The volunteer landscape is evolving faster than ever. The COVID era has reshaped who volunteers and what they expect, while social changes challenge traditional recruitment and retention approaches.
With digital technology also advancing rapidly, this toolkit offers Volunteer Managers timely support to re-evaluate the role of digital within their organisations, allowing them to adapt and thrive amidst these shifts.
What’s in the toolkit for me?
The toolkit is perfect for any volunteer managers and leaders. But anyone involved in the volunteering world will find it useful! It tackles big questions for the future, such as:
- How can we prepare for the impact of AI?
- In what ways can digital help us be more inclusive?
- What exactly is open data, and how can it add value?
Through a range of practical advice and shared learnings, the toolkit empowers Volunteer Managers to adopt the right digital solutions on their own terms, addressing real-world challenges in volunteer management.
Part One: Developing your vision
This first section of the Toolkit is designed to prepare you and your organisation for a digital development journey – to set your direction of travel and build your knowledge, motivation and confidence to get going.
Within Part One you’ll find five elements to help identify your needs, diagnose your issues, ask the right questions, formulate an approach and embark on your digital journey. And because many like to learn from their peers, we’ve included case studies or quotes from involving organisations, on how they’ve tackled these questions and challenges.
What to expect in Part One:
In developing the Toolkit we learned that bringing others with you is one of the hardest parts of digital implementation. Being able to communicate clearly around digital is vital, which is why our initial goal is to prepare you for some key milestones – whether you’re making a pitch for investment or talking to a software provider or digital specialist.
Part Two: Navigating your Digital L&D
The second section of the Toolkit focuses on some of the key areas of volunteer engagement where digital tools and approaches are most commonly used.
Just like in Part One, the topics here are based on insights from Volunteer Managers captured in our development phase – all are real areas of practice where leaders in volunteering feel digital solutions have a role to play.
However, unlike Part One (where the five elements are designed to complement each other, building a road map for your digital journey) the seven elements here are more like standalone resources addressing different aspects of digital adoption. So start wherever feels most useful – you don’t need to complete all seven elements if they’re not relevant for your needs.
