People

Aim: To have well-trained, supported, and motivated adult volunteers from all backgrounds, and to increase the number of young people from diverse backgrounds.

It’s important that every volunteer has a wonderful experience at Scouts. If they enjoy volunteering with us, we’ll inspire them to keep supporting our young people to gain skills for life.

As well as appreciating the amazing work of our current volunteers, we want to welcome new volunteers. With more volunteers to deliver our programmes, we can give even more young people the chance to enjoy Scouts.

Goals

• Recruit more volunteers and welcome new volunteers more warmly from the start. We’ll make sure our teams and our way of volunteering fits with the time people want to give, and we have people with the right skills and support. We’ll also make our processes more accessible by creating up to date recruitment and appointment tools.
• Make volunteering a positive experience, every day. To do this, volunteers are leading the redesign of future volunteers’ experience, using a new co-led team approach.
• Create more engaging learning for volunteers and supporting volunteers to develop their skills when and where they need to.
• Build the digital tools to enable all the above. This means developing a new fit-for-purpose membership system and a convenient way for members to learn, co-created with volunteers. They’ll both be easy to use and accessible through scouts.org.uk.

Progress a year on

• In May 2023, we started rolling out the first cultural changes to volunteering locally. This focused on our new approach to volunteering in teams, what we call ourselves, and how we use Our Volunteering Culture statement to help set the right expectations. We’ve also made changes to local Trustee Boards and improved the support available to them.
• Most of our essential learning, known as Growing Roots, has been developed in collaboration with around 200 volunteers’ input and subject experts. We’re now testing it locally so we can make it even better before we launch.
• We have 105 Transformation Leads in place working across all 85 Counties, Areas and Regions in the UK. They’re helping to prepare, inform, engage and communicate in their local patch about the upcoming changes.
• We’ve concluded our collaboration with Girlguiding, generously funded by the Pears Foundation, to build a new recruitment tool to help us welcome more volunteers to both organisations. We’ve learned lots from each other about how to overcome shared challenges and the new tool will be part of the systems going live later in 2024.
• Our Digital Skills tool launched in the summer of 2023, and our work in this area was awarded Runner-Up in the Digital Leaders 100, Digital Skills category. The tool helps volunteers to build their skills and confidence. This is part of supporting lifelong learning and it’s an important part of the support we’re providing around our new systems.
• We completed the digital build for our new learning and membership systems. The digital build has been warmly received by over 320 volunteers in testing. As data migration has proved even more complex than expected, we’re now working on a longer timeline than forecast last year.
• We’ve improved our support, web guidance, and readiness information to help everyone understand and prepare for the changes coming locally.

What’s next

• We’ll work in a partnership with a nationally recognised organisation that is a leader in safety on movement-wide training.
• We’ll work in partnership with our Early Adopter Counties to improve how we welcome new volunteers, ahead of the wider changes to come for everyone.
• We’ll complete the data migration of all our member data into the new systems and make sure it’s been thoroughly tested and all our digital tools work together.
• During the year ahead, we’ll work with Counties to implement changes to volunteering in their area. This means rolling out cultural changes and going live with new digital systems.