Planning for Volunteers

Why take time to plan?

By taking time to plan, you’ll:

• Clarify why you want volunteers and what they’ll do
• Set clear goals and priorities for their involvement
• Make roles meaningful, inclusive and aligned with your values
• Understand your capacity, resources and any associated costs
• Prepare for challenges
• Ensure volunteers feel welcomed, valued and supported
• Develop a volunteering culture within your organisation
• Improve volunteer retention
• Save time, money and stress in the long run for all

Volunteers should not replace paid staff

Financial pressures make things tough, with cuts to funding and fewer resources to meet the growing demands on services. This could mean job cuts or not being able to recruit for certain paid roles. Can organisations solve this by replacing paid staff with volunteers? The answer is no! Volunteers are not a replacement for paid staff and/or what should be paid work (this includes contractors).

While we understand the challenges, there are many important reasons why volunteers should not replace paid staff/paid role:

• Its unethical
• Potential legal (employment law) and financial (HMRC) implications
• Viewed as taking advantage of volunteers and their motivations to volunteer – treating volunteers unfairly
• It doesn’t save money – volunteering still has associated costs
• Creates a negative organisational culture and reputation
• Undermines staff morale
• Discourages people from volunteering anywhere in the future
• Makes it hard to recruit volunteers in the future
• Paid roles exist for a reason – volunteers don’t have contracts and aren’t guaranteed to be available all the time, which could impact services and those accessing the services, for example not being able to run
• Overall, it’s not a good experience for anyone involved

Always keep volunteer roles distinct from paid positions, having clear policies explaining this.

Volunteers should also not be delivering a service that is usually paid for when recipients have the means to pay.

Reimbursing expenses

Although people give their time freely, they shouldn’t be out-of-pocket by volunteering. Not being reimbursed reasonable expenses can be a barrier to volunteering and you could have a situation where only people who can afford to volunteer do so.

If you don’t have the funding available to reimburse expenses it doesn’t preclude you from involving volunteers, just be honest with potential volunteers from the start and aim to include this in future funding applications.

Designing volunteer roles

As part of your planning for volunteering it’s important to think about:

• Why you’re involving volunteers?
• What will they be doing?
• When are they are volunteering?
• Where will they volunteer?

These questions can help you define the role and shape the volunteer role description – whilst ensuring volunteers and those involved understand the activities, expectations and requirements. It also helps you determine what is needed in relation to recruitment, resources, capacity and support.

What is micro-volunteering?

Micro-volunteering grew during Covid-19 and has continued as new ways to offer flexible opportunities for both the volunteer and the organisation, enabling increased engagement and inclusion to someone who might not have volunteered before.

It’s offers short-term or one-off volunteer opportunities with low commitment, which could be ideal for people who have limited availability but still want to offer their time to an organisation they might have otherwise missed. Such activities could include creating case studies, sorting and collecting donations, research, helping at events, gardening, designing a flyer or fundraising

Get in touch if you are looking for guidance about creating a volunteer role and/or role description.

Health and safety considerations

Much of health and safety legislation is designed to protect workers and employees and doesn’t cover volunteers. However, it’s hard to imagine a situation where it would be justifiable to treat volunteers in a less favourable manner than paid staff – an organisations duty of care applies just a much to volunteers as it does to staff. Volunteers should be included in your health and safety policies and risk assessments.

Failure to meet that duty could result in the organisation and its trustees being liable if a volunteer is injured due to volunteering.

Driver Volunteers

“If a volunteer is just using their own vehicle to drive to and from their place of volunteering, they don’t need to disclose this to their insurer. This isn’t a ‘volunteering activity’ – in the same way that someone driving to work isn’t driving for business or commercial purposes” NCVO

Do we need insurance cover for volunteers?

Organisations have a duty of care to those under their direction, including volunteers, so make sure your insurance covers volunteers for risks like injury or property damage.

There are different types of insurance cover, therefore it’s important to consider all the options when arranging insurance cover for volunteers.

We do acknowledge that for small organisations costs for insurance can be of a worry or a challenge to consider within their budgets, so if you do want any guidance on insurance or looking for low-cost insurance just get in touch.

What policies and procedures do we need?

Ideally, you’ll collectively with the Trustees/Committee Members look at what essential policies and procedures are needed, for example – health and safety, safeguarding, confidentiality, data protection.

Writing a new policy or procedure can feel overwhelming and difficult to know where to begin and what to include. Keep them clear and practical with the relevant information so they can be understood by others – they don’t need to be long documents.

What is a volunteer policy?

A volunteer policy gives an overall framework for volunteer involvement in your organisation and outlines the commitment to volunteers, giving clarity and consistency on decision making and expectations. It will refer to other policies that include volunteers, bringing it all together in one document.

Get in touch if you want any help and guidance in creating or reviewing your policy.

Safeguarding responsibilities

Safeguarding is about protecting certain people who may be in vulnerable circumstances. These people may be at risk of abuse or neglect due to the actions (or lack of actions) of another person. It applies to children and young people under 18, and adults who have care and support needs.

Organisations need to:

• Keep people safe whilst they are accessing your services
• Know how to recognise when someone is at risk and/or experiencing abuse or neglect
• Know how to respond
• Protect volunteers from potential abuse or risk whilst volunteering

If the volunteer role is with children or adults are at risk, you have a legal duty to keep people safe – protecting from potential abuse and risk. Your volunteer programme must:

• Have safer recruitment processes, for example a DBS check (if it meets the DBS legal requirements)
• Have safeguarding polices and processes– ensuring volunteers understand and know what to do
• Create volunteer role descriptions
• Provide training to volunteers on spotting and reporting concerns
• Provide a safe and inclusive environment for everyone
• Make it clear to volunteers about expected behaviour
• Have support systems in place for volunteers
• Review policies, procedures and training – ensuring they are up-to-date and comply with current legislation and good practice

You can include safeguarding within volunteer inductions and where relevant as a regular discussion point in supervisions/1:1’s/team meetings. Obviously don’t wait until these if there are any concerns, making sure volunteers are aware of this

More information

Keeping volunteer records and data

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Legislation strengthens and extends the Data Protection law and focuses on individual rights.

Volunteer personal information you may need to keep could be:

• Contact details
• Details of experience, skills and preferences used to assess suitability for a role (recorded on application form or gained through interview)
• Monitoring information including ethnicity, disability etc
• Information relating to DBS checks
• References
• Supervision notes

Some of this information is regarded as “sensitive data” under the act and must be processed accordingly.

DBS (Disclosure Barring Services) Checks

All organisations must ensure that staff, volunteers and trustees are suitable and legally allowed to carry out their roles, which can include (if legally required) criminal records. DBS (The Disclosure and Barring Service) is the service that processes all criminal record checks in England and Wales.

To decide if a volunteer role requires a DBS check, you should look at; the activities, what it involves, who they are supporting, how often, level of supervision provided and are there any risks. DBS checks are based on the activities someone does – not just the role title.

You can only request an Enhanced or Standard DBS check if the law allows it for that role. The level of check depends on whether the person will be doing regulated activities and are volunteering directly with children and/or adults at risk and how often.

Need help? Email: volunteercentre@communityworks.org.uk