Volunteers Week runs from Thurs 1st to Weds 7th June.  To support and celebrate organisations who work with volunteers we will be sharing an article for each day of the event.

Managing volunteers – getting it right from the start

Managing your volunteers effectively and supporting them will help you keep them. Here’s some advice on good practice.

Writing a Volunteer policy

A written volunteer policy helps define the role of your volunteers, and how they can expect to be treated. It should explain recruitment, equality and diversity, training, supervision, support and health and safety procedures and will:

• Demonstrate your organisation's commitment to its volunteer programme.
• Ensure consistency and that all volunteers are treated equally and fairly.
• Let them know where they can turn to if they feel that things are going wrong.
• Help paid staff, senior management and trustees fully understand why volunteers are involved, and what their roles are.

Our factsheet Writing a Volunteer Policy will give you some basic guidelines about what to look at, and how to write your policy. 

Supporting volunteers

It’s important to really get to know your volunteers and invite feedback to be able assess their satisfaction with their roles. This can help you revise roles if needed, and provide opportunities to keep volunteers involved and motivated. Click here for the Institute for Volunteering Research’s toolkit - having a system for supporting a volunteer can help you to ensure that the volunteer and your organisation get the best out of your relationship.  Our factsheet Supporting and Supervising Volunteers can help.

Factsheets

​If you would like to receive our free Volunteering Factsheets please complete the form below. You will be sent a confirmation email to check that you have requested our Volunteer Factsheets and that your email address is accurate. Once you have "clicked" to confirm this you will be sent our Volunteering Factsheets.