Open volunteering: the role of digital in tackling the volunteering crisis

Earlier this year, research sponsored by Doit charity partner and client Fareshare found that the majority of Brits want to volunteer – yet 6 in 10 charities report that they are struggling to find the volunteers they need to deliver their services. Volunteering levels have been in a state of general decline since the pandemic. How do we square this with the evidence that Brits are keen and eager to help out?

I would be lying if I said there was a single answer. The world has changed a lot over the last decade. In particular, we know that economic and financial pressures are playing a big role in putting on a check on people’s volunteering. When people are under financial pressure or generally feeling unstable in their living circumstances, they’re less likely to have the spare time or energy to think about giving time back to their communities. We know that there are also a multitude of social challenges, like rising ill health, that create barriers for engagement.

Unsurprisingly, there’s quite a bit of discussion about the impact of these issues on charities and the voluntary sector. But there’s another part of the story that doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves – the role that digital infrastructure has to play in helping people to find the right opportunities for them. Or to be exact, the way that chaotic and inconsistent digital infrastructure can act as a deterrent to people looking to give their time.

Right now charities use a dozen or more different systems to recruit, manage, train and record the activities of volunteers. Each of these systems is made by a different company or non-profit to different requirements. For the most part, those systems don’t speak to each other. Though one or two of them might be able to integrate, the process of setting up that integration is usually clunky.

Some tools available to charities are just for building their own recruitment platforms. Others are shared advertising boards. Someone looking for volunteering opportunities for the first time is immediately overwhelmed by choice. Charities looking for volunteers need to advertise in multiple places for maximum exposure. The market is fragmented and difficult to navigate.

(I wouldn’t be a very good CEO if I didn’t point out here that Doit has more charities on our books than any other volunteering platform, and tens of thousands of interested people visiting us every month, making us the leading volunteering platform. But even we don’t have everyone and everything!)

Then volunteers themselves face hurdle after hurdle to actually getting to help the good cause they choose to support. Applications are often cumbersome and slow to process. If you want to try volunteering with three or four different orgs to see what’s right for you, you’ll probably end up going through the same processes — like DBS and reference checking — over and over again, even though these are standard. How many hours of charity time are effectively wasted on unknowingly repeating the same process over and over again?

Once someone has finally done good for the cause, only the charity they volunteer with is ever likely to know about it. You might get a reward or some kind of recognition for volunteering every weekend for a year with one organisation, but there’s easy way to identify all the people who are giving their time generously to a range of good causes. You could help a different charity in your city every weekend for a year and unless you tell the local paper yourself, never get recognised for it!

The fragmented market sees charities spending money and time on repetitive work, constantly having to experiment with new recruitment methods. For would-be volunteers the experience is full of friction, barriers and what feels like asks to jump through hoops for the sake of it. Everything we know about engagement tells us that reduced friction means more people will take up an opportunity.

Of course, that doesn’t mean a one size fits all solution to volunteer recruiting is going to work either. There are more than 170,000 registered charities in the UK, plus tens of thousands of small community groups, with thousands more appearing every year. It would be impossible to ever design a single national platform that could cater perfectly to the needs of each one of these organisations.

What the Church of England needs from a volunteering platform is inevitably going to be different to what, say, the Scout Association or Mind does. And what the Scouts and Mind need is going to be different to each other, and both different again from what a small community litter picking group or local Church foodbank need.

Bigger, more sophisticated organisations will always need their own volunteer management system. Smaller charities and community groups will always need free or at least inexpensive solutions to get their opportunities in front of a mass audience. Even the smallest voluntary organisations can have quite sophisticated or complicated needs.

That’s why at Doit we say that our mission is to build the digital rails for civil society, not just volunteering management software or a national volunteering platform — that’s just one part of the puzzle. For the last year, we’ve been working hard to upgrade our systems so that they can be at the heart of a vision for the voluntary sector that we call Open Volunteering.

With Open Volunteering rather than trying to find a one-size fits all solution to the sector’s digital challenges that simply doesn’t exist, Doit is seeking to lead a revolution in how charities and volunteers can use technology to do good things for their communities. We’ve been overhauling the architecture that underpins our products, both free and commercial, to make it future-proof — and accessible!

We’re working towards developing open data standards that will make it easy for a charity to publish once to any volunteering platform, management system or advertising board and have their advertisement populated across the UK’s many tools. This will let charities, campaigns and communities have their own dedicated and custom platforms whilst still getting their opportunities in front of the public.

The Big Help Out saw an early test of this approach. Our new architecture meant the BHO app could integrate with a range of solutions from other providers. Non-profits with limited time and resources, or a big investment in their own solution, could benefit from the Doit powered app through a simple linking system.

Our goal in the future is to apply the same open data approach to volunteering itself. As well as improvements to the platform itself, the team here at Doit are working on the development of virtual ‘volunteering wallets’; personal databases that would let volunteers carry over identity checks, references, volunteering histories, CVs and more from charity to charity. The volunteer would also be the one who controls their data and decides what to share when.

That’s why we’ve renamed our public volunteering solution Doit Life. In the future, Doit Life has the potential to be home to all manner of other features and systems that integrate with our volunteering product.

Open Volunteering won’t by itself solve the crisis that the sector finds itself facing. As I said at the start of this post, there’s a lot happening in the world right now to create a difficult environment for the voluntary sector, some of which we have limited control over.

Our use of technology and data is one thing we can control however, and moving towards the Open Volunteering approach will make it dramatically easier for both charities and would-be volunteers to connect with each other. That in itself means we can all spend less time thinking about the logistics of recruitment and more time thinking about how we design engaging opportunities that help to overcome the other challenges facing the sector.