Volunteer Management: All Set for a Decade of AI Disruption

By now you’ve almost certainly been exposed to some exciting yet nerve-wracking news on artificial intelligence.

This news may have included some scary stories about how AI is going to ruin everyone’s economic prospects and lead to the destruction of everything we hold dear.

Even for those that are excited by the prospect of an AI-driven future, it can be really difficult to cut through the hype and separate dreamy futurism from what’s already available to use today.

Here at Do It we’re very upbeat about AI - and that optimism is based on the products we’re building, the changes we’re seeing, and the depth of our vision on how it’s going to positively impact the charity sector.

We’re seeing a world where charities are freed from large parts of their administration. Does this mean charities staffed by robots? Absolutely not, in fact being unburdened by high administrative and tech costs, charities are able to pour more resources into delivering an even more human experience.

In the coming weeks and months we’ll share that vision with you in detail in a series of blog  articles that will help you understand where things are going for the sector and how you can maximise the opportunity

For now, let’s look at 10 ways that volunteer recruitment, communication and retention can be improved right now, today.

1. Volunteer Recruitment - AI will improve search, matching candidates with volunteering roles much more efficiently than today.

1. Volunteer Screening - Programs like Do It’s Volunteer Passport will feed into those search mechanisms but also make it easier to automate the process of checking credentials, qualifications and criminal history.

1. Volunteer Application Process - No matter how well designed a UI, today’s application processes are generally based on a rigid data structure. By introducing AI we can take out the legwork, allow for nuance, and only involve humans where absolutely necessary.

1. Volunteer Onboarding - It’s going to get much easier to automate repetitive tasks like screening interviews, boilerplate training, gathering identifying information and building a profile on a volunteer using information available on the web. This will make it easier for the humans that support the actual interview process.

1. Volunteer Training - It’s difficult to manage training for any charity, especially those with large volunteer bases. Nowadays you need a solid learning management system (LMS) which costs money and still requires upkeep. Imagine if AI could suggest and provide a training program based on the type of opportunity you’re publishing.

1. Volunteer Scheduling - Because of the sheer number of possibilities, variables and nuances, scheduling is incredibly difficult to get right. AI provides the opportunity to move away from today’s Hobson’s choice between (a) a big ugly Excel schedule or (b) a scheduling system that needs a whole team working on it.

1. Volunteer Communications - Volunteers + Good Communication = Retention. One of the biggest challenges today is not just recruitment but also retention of volunteers. Email parsing and generative AI give us a chance to move beyond the limitations of transactional email and into interactive, responsive communications that don’t leave a Volunteer Manager snowed under by admin.

1. Expense Management - Expenses are complex to allocate, submit, approve and reject. As well as handling the expense submission process, AI can be used during the earlier recruitment and application processes to prioritise volunteers based on location, reducing the expenses required to fill an opportunity.

1. Volunteer Evaluation - This is linked to great communications, however a volunteer’s improvement is key in the value they bring to the charity but also how confident they feel as a volunteer. Today’s structured systems make this difficult again due to differences in how evaluation might be performed across different types of opportunity. Again, it’s not impossible to imagine this process becoming much easier with AI.

1. Volunteer Feedback - To be able to attract more volunteers, charities need to also receive from the people out there doing the hard yards. Being able to move away from a rigid 1-5 star system and into natural language feedback is enabled by the new abilities of AI to summarise, categorise and organise large banks of unstructured text.

So there’s a few ideas to get you started. Subscribe to our blog as we deep dive into these areas and more in the coming months.