People

Our aim: To have well trained, better supported, and motivated adult volunteers, as well as more young people from diverse backgrounds.

Progress a year on

If we’re delivering great programmes and helping more young people get skills for life, we need to attract more volunteers to join us. It’s important that every volunteer has an amazing experience at Scouts, so they’re inspired to keep volunteering and supporting our young people.

So far, we’ve spoken to over 5,000 people to find out what could make their volunteering experience better. We’ve listened to their ideas, and we’re using them to make volunteering the best it can be.

Our approach

To start with, we’ll focus on:

• Helping to recruit more volunteers, and creating a warmer welcome for all
• Ensuring positive volunteering every day, by redesigning how we volunteer
• Creating more engaging learning, and helping volunteers when they need it
• We’ve now agreed our approach for transforming these areas. We’ll prepare for 2023 by:
• Building the new recruitment and appointment tools
• Designing our new team approach to volunteering, and
• Creating our new learning

Digital Transformation

To underpin this, we’ve partnered with suppliers to build great digital tools. These tools will help us make volunteering easier, and reduce the time volunteers spend on admin. We’re creating a new digital membership system that’s easy to use, and it’ll be linked with a new digital learning platform. This platform means all learning will be in one, easy-to-find place.

Creating a warmer welcome for new volunteers together

Funded by Pears Foundation, we’ve partnered with Girlguiding to transform our approach to the crucial early stages of a volunteer’s journey. As part of this, we’re building a new digital tool to help make recruitment easier, and a new volunteer is in control of signing up. We’re working with a County to co-design these tools, and to make sure they’ll work on the ground.

Working with volunteers every step of the way

We’ve been sharing progress and testing ideas on our Testing Hub, to make sure we get things right. So far, over 950 people have given us feedback on our Testing Hub. On the ground, we’ll be trying out more of our new tools and support during 2022.

What’s next

• To make all these changes possible, we’ll be working with local line managers. Currently, the focus is on: understanding the changes, helping them build the teams they need to support these changes locally, and getting local plans in place.
• We’ll start piloting new tools with volunteers during the summer and autumn of 2022, to make sure they’re meeting everyone’s needs. – At the start of 2023, we’ll work with a small group of Counties, and support them to make changes in their area. This way, we can learn and make improvements. In the spring, we’ll roll out these changes and new tools to everyone.
• We’ll keep supporting teams where they need it, and asking for feedback, so we can keep improving.
• We’ll also work on other areas of improvement. We’ll continue to update learning and look at other tools to make our ongoing volunteer experience better, such as reviews and awards.