A new digital tool for recruiting volunteers

This is an exciting opportunity for us to take volunteer experiences on board and transform the joining experience so that it’s welcoming and as simple as possible.

Outside of my role as lead volunteer for the Welcome project, I’m Deputy County Commissioner (People) in Central Yorkshire with a passion for making sure our leaders get the support that they need.

The Welcome team started by talking to volunteers and enquirers who wanted to join, to map out the current journey and identify places where it wasn’t meeting our needs.

Volunteers told us the current recruitment and welcome process can be admin-heavy, so a solution is needed to help to reduce that burden. The Welcome project has come up with a new digital recruitment platform, focusing on creating a positive volunteer journey which meets the needs and expectations of both new and existing volunteers.

We’re looking at functions to match volunteers to the right opportunity for them, as well as flexibility around those opportunities to remove some of the potential barriers currently faced when joining.

The aim is to make it simple and easy for new volunteers to join and for existing volunteers to manage.

After thinking about how the tool could integrate with the new digital experience to come for better managing membership data, we’re now building the new system with cloudThing, a digital design and development agency. The solution will be integrated with the other digital tools we’re building for learning and managing our membership to create a smooth digital experience.

Through the Scouts Testing Hub, volunteers told us that they saw benefits in a service that would be transparent, flexible, streamlined, and able to give consistent information to volunteers. Benefits were also seen in a process that would be more personalised to volunteers by better finding suitable roles, as well as tracking and following up on expressions of interest.

We’re also working alongside groups of volunteers in selected areas. You can read about one of these pieces of work below.

The Welcome project is just one element of the People Programme within Scouts. The Programme’s also looking at improving how we learn, and how we volunteer to make things easier and more fun.

Co-designing with Scouts Cymru

What’s co-designing?

Co-design describes our method for designing the physical ‘product’ element of the project. Instead of designing the solution behind-the-scenes and testing it when complete, we’re following industry good practice and making sure volunteers are involved in the creation at every step of the process.

We used national statistics, membership statistics and the input of regional teams to select an area of the UK to work closely with in the early stages: the co-design County/Area/Region. Local volunteers from the chosen County/Area/Region will work with our project team over the next few months to create the first version of the platform.

This is an iterative process which will be kicking off with some workshops this month.

Why Scouts Cymru?

The first group we’re working with are three Areas in South Cymru: Cardiff and Vale, Mid Glamorgan and Gwent.

The volunteers in these areas will be taking part in workshops and testing early drafts of the platform. Alongside the digital development, we’re also coming up with some new ways to support enquirers and considering how we’ll roll out the platform.

As we go along, we’ll be constantly improving designs to make sure they meet the needs of current and future volunteers.  

Next stages

To prepare for the roll out in 2023, we’ll continue to test the new digital tool for recruiting volunteers throughout 2022.

In the summer, we‘ll work with different Counties/Areas/Regions to test the platform and new journey in many different contexts. We’ll also test with communities who don’t normally join us to learn how we can be more welcoming and inclusive.