Five things that make a great Volunteer Coordinator?

The thing about working with volunteers...

Volunteers play a crucial role in the success of many organisations and nowhere is that more so than at Citizens Advice. Numbers reported vary but somewhere between 17,000 - 22,000 people in England and Wales give up some time every year, for free, to support their local Citizens Advice office. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, the voluntary sector has faced something of a crisis in terms of what people want to 'put into' volunteering. Post-pandemic, people who want to volunteer are by and large wanting short-term commitments, flexible hours and to volunteer remotely from home. This poses some interesting challenges for local Citizens Advices who require long-term commitments from their volunteers (very basic training can take at least three months on a one-day per week basis): consistency is essential when trying to coordinate a high number of volunteers, and, of course, as community-based charities an in-person presence is essential to fully integrate into the team and understand the needs of the community. Cost-of-living pressures also seem to have had an impact with some volunteers understandably choosing to find an extra day of work to increase their income rather than spend that day working for free.

Unsurprisingly, what people want to 'get out' of volunteering remains fairly consistent with the past. Young people or career changers are seeking work experience for their CVs, and retirees are searching for a rewarding way to spend their free time and expand their social network. In between all of that there are motivations to give back to your community, learn new skills, and find like-minded people.

So, with such a changing landscape and such a varied group of people to accommodate, who'd want to be a Volunteer Coordinator?

Who'd want to be a Volunteer Coordinator?

Being a Volunteer Coordinator opens up a whole world of exposure to the kind of opportunities that are essential for understanding people management and how a charity - scratch that - any organisation works. It’s therefore the perfect role for anyone seeking to take a step up into a supervisory or managerial role, while also offering some freedom to shape a project or programme in interesting and new ways that sometimes are unavailable when working solely with paid employees.

A skilled Volunteer Coordinator, ensuring the smooth and efficient running of a volunteer programme, must understand the organisation back-to-front and front-to-back. Their volunteers will want to know everything about the organisation: who works in it, what the roles are, what services are offered, what they can or can't do as a volunteer – everything! While the extent may vary between size and type of organisation, as a Volunteer Coordinator you are recruiter, trainer, well-being coach, critical friend, and champion.

Exposure to wearing these various hats and playing these various roles is an excellent opportunity to discover aspects of the job you enjoy (or might want to pursue into other roles in the future), understand people's motives and behaviours, and understand how you bring these factors together to impact the success of your organisation.

Clearly, the role can be challenging, so below are just five things that make a great Volunteer Coordinator.

What makes a great Volunteer Coordinator?

1. Putting the volume into volunteering - the capacity question.

For reasons outlined above, it can be really tough to find the right people to volunteer for you. Many of the people you'll reach out to as Volunteer Coordinator want to give just a few weeks or couple of months of time while they're in-between jobs. They may want to only work half days or specific hours when the posts you're trying to fill require a 9-to-5 or evening and weekend commitments. Some people prefer remote working or can only see themselves volunteering if they can log-on for an hour at home.

Once you've sifted through all of those people you'll often find that you're down to a very small number of candidates that 'fit' the roles and needs of your organisation - and that's before you've even assessed their capability. So, I'm afraid that to be a great Volunteer Coordinator you're going to need that rare trait that everyone says they have but few people actually do: persistence!

In my experience, about only 1 in 10 people who enquire about volunteering will follow up with an application to volunteer (providing their details, reasons for wanting to volunteer and what time they can commit). Of that small number who are interviewed, few will commit to more than 6 months and follow the training as desired. Very few ever go 'all the way' to establishing themselves as a consistent presence within the organisation for more than a year. Of course, there are so many reasons for that but nevertheless a great Volunteer Coordinator needs to play the numbers game, work at volume, and persist with finding those great volunteers.

2. Taking the apt from aptitude - the capability question.

Everyone has something to offer somewhere. Our strengths and weakness are all different and we all need to be nurtured to become better versions of ourselves and develop our skills. We don't arrive in new roles fully-formed and ready to perform as though we've been doing the work since time immemorial. There is always somewhere with a volunteering opportunity just perfect for someone to grow into.

However, not everywhere has something to offer everyone. For example, I would be more hinderance than help if I volunteered my time as a community gardener. I don't know my begonias from my bell flowers! As Volunteer Coordinator you will need to be proficient in identifying who should be taken on to volunteer. It can be an unenviable task acting as gatekeeper to new entrants to your organisation because people without the right skills or character can upset the cultural equilibrium of the workplace. Get it wrong and you have the further unenviable task of managing expectations and potentially asking a volunteer to leave. Furthermore, you'll need to be attuned to identifying a person's aptitude for progressing beyond entry-level roles or taking on more responsibility over time.

A great Volunteer Coordinator has to take a critical view of the costs and benefits in the time and resource it'll take to bring a volunteer up to the required level to do the job. Just because someone is giving their time for free doesn't mean they are free to your organisation - they come with a time and investment cost. Unlike when recruiting employees, you are working at higher volume, may not need to choose one candidate over another, and the candidate may have no direct prior experience. This is very easy to overlook these factors that affect your judgment of aptitude, and it can be costly if you get it wrong. A great Volunteer Coordinator needs to assess a volunteer's aptitude (and potential aptitude) and decide if they are an apt fit for the organisation. In organisations with various volunteer roles, don't be afraid to ask for help from colleagues to help you identify great candidates or give a second opinion on a candidate you're unsure about!

3. Setting up for success - Know what your volunteers need from your organisation

We've talked about what the organisation needs from its volunteers but what about what volunteers need to see from an organisation? There's no point spending all that time working through hundreds of applications and determining whether a volunteer is worth the investment of time for them to just... leave.

A great Volunteer Coordinator understands that they are not just the representative of the organisation to the volunteer cohort, but they are also the representative of the volunteers to the organisation. As Volunteer Coordinator you walk both paths. You see your organisation anew with every new volunteer, while also knowing the entrenched systems and processes that hold the organisation together.

This is a profoundly unique position to be in. The insights you gain from seeing the gaps between the experience of new entrants to your organisation and the experience of long-serving staff or other volunteers can often be profound. Your manager should want to hear about them from you. New volunteers can bring fresh eyes to old challenges and, in that, bring the solutions. Whether it is a big observation (e.g. about the organisation's culture) or a small observation (e.g. a better way to file the post), the rich, varied experience of volunteers from different backgrounds and careers is a smorgasbord of new ideas waiting to unleashed.

A great Volunteer Coordinator should have vision for the organisation and ask themselves what in their organisation is blocking or hindering their volunteers from having a great experience, finding routes for progression, and telling their friends that they should be giving their time to you for free too. The hurdles may be big or small, but they will exist one way or another, and a great Volunteer Coordinator should work to identify them and set up ways to mitigate or remove these hurdles while also investing time and effort into the things that are working well.

4. Maintaining success - Bringing colleagues with you on a volunteer journey

While a great Volunteer Coordinator has started identifying, implementing and advocating for the systems and processes that set up a successful volunteer programme within the organisation, it’s important that they consider the ways to maintain that success. As I’ve explained above, any ambitious volunteer programme is going to require working at scale and no matter how productive you may be, you are only ever going to be just one person (if your organisation even has a Volunteer Coordinator at all). Working with so many volunteers on your own can often be a lonely place. While volunteer coordination may appear sociable, in reality, a Volunteer Coordinator can often find themselves spread thinly across a large number of people - especially if you have volunteers carrying out various roles, at various locations or across various workstreams.

To tackle this, a great Volunteer Coordinator needs to make ‘mini’ volunteer coordinators out of their colleagues too. In an organisation that uses volunteers, your colleagues are going to need to know the ‘volunteer script’ – the things you’ve done to set the organisation up to succeed with volunteers: what the organisation does, how the volunteers fit in, what volunteer progression looks like, and what the expectations are for various roles. It can be quite a lot of information for colleagues to be briefed on and understand for volunteers to get a consistent expectation of your organisation. Of course, your colleagues will have their own work to do too and finding time to assimilate the ‘volunteer script’ can take time and investment.

A great Volunteer Coordinator also needs to think about how they can demonstrate the leadership required to set their colleagues up for success and get them enthused about how volunteers can support achieving shared organisational goals. For your colleagues, working with volunteers will not mean less work – in fact, will likely mean more work – but it will be better quality work. By modelling best practices and playing an active role in team discussions about the volunteer experience a great Volunteer Coordinator will start to build confidence in their colleagues to work more closely with their volunteers, feel the excitement and satisfaction that can be gained from showing new volunteers what a ‘job done well’ looks like, and may even eventually alleviate some pressures of work by building up organisational resource and expertise.

Further to this point, leadership also means protecting colleagues from those volunteers who are unreliable or may lack the skills required. Leadership in this role means getting the capacity and capability questions right (points 1 and 2), and being willing to have the hard conversations with volunteers who may be putting undue pressure on colleagues.

5. Celebrating success - Enjoy the volunteer journey

In more cynical moments, I have been known to describe being a Volunteer Coordinator as like trying to fill a bucket full of holes with rocks (bear with me…).

The bucket is your service needs (e.g. KPIs, and client and stakeholder expectations). The rocks are your volunteers – big rocks (the long-term, most reliable, and/or skilled volunteers) and small rocks (the short-term, unreliable, and/or lacking the skills you need). The holes in the bucket are reasons volunteers leave (e.g. lack of progression, new opportunities, poor experience, etc.). Your goal is to always be looking for the bigger rocks to fill the bucket while closing the holes to reduce your volunteer attrition rate. Points 1-4 above show just how difficult this task can be.

A higher turnover of volunteers than employed staff is an expected part of being Volunteer Coordinator and at times it can feel like a Sisyphean task. In many ways, you will always be pushing that boulder up the hill. However, much as Albert Camus once concisely put “the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy”. For me, so too is the experience of volunteer coordination. A great Volunteer Coordinator must celebrate the part they played in the learning and development of the volunteers under their stewardship – however big or small.

Working directly with volunteers is one of the most rewarding roles, or aspects of a role, within the voluntary sector. Volunteering can, and does, have life-changing / life-affirming impacts on people and they discover things about themselves they never knew or do things they never thought they were capable of. Volunteers will often want to stay in touch with you or the organisation to share their career successes long after their time volunteering because your mentorship and the opportunities you opened up for them have played a huge role in the direction of their life. There is no doubt, it can be an incredibly humbling and rewarding experience.

Therefore, a great Volunteer Coordinator doesn’t see a bucket of rocks but instead sees a basket of diamonds just waiting to be discovered.

Summary

In summary, a great Volunteer Coordinator needs to demonstrate:

1.???? Persistence: working at volume to find great volunteers.

2.???? Proficiency: identifying suitability of volunteer candidates effectively.

3.???? Vision: helping to shape the organisation to provide a better volunteering experience.

4.???? Leadership: bringing colleagues along and supporting them to work with volunteers.

5.???? Celebration: enjoying the role played in the personal and professional growth of volunteers.

If you think volunteer coordination is a role that you would enjoy, we are recruiting. You can find the full role details and application pack for our Volunteer Coordinator at www.citizensadvicekc.org.uk/work-with-us [application deadline 12th January 2024 at 17:00]. ??