With many volunteer management solutions available, we wanted to produce a case study comparing the difference between a legacy system and Volunteero.
Racing Welfare is a charity that provides professional guidance and practical help to people currently or formerly involved in horse racing. The organisation has around 60 staff members and 150 volunteers. Volunteers typically conduct direct support to those formerly involved in racing via check in and chat calls. More widely volunteers help with fundraising and events staffing.
Racing Welfare had for a number of years been using Better Impact, a well known platform that is widely used. In their own words, here is why they were reviewing the market:
Improving volunteer engagement - “Volunteer engagement with the system was low, especially from our fundraising volunteers who support us on a more ad-lib basis.”
Saving time managing volunteers - “We needed to find a way of managing our growing number of volunteers and how they reported back to us.”
A simpler way to tailor the platform to meet their needs - “we had to go through the time-consuming process of adapting the functions available to best suit our needs”
Simpler oversight process - “ Checking volunteer feedback was difficult and required someone to log in every day to manually identify any issues”
Volunteero was an obvious choice for the team. Through our innovative volunteer management dashboard and user-friendly app, Racing Welfare will now enjoy 825 hours saved across the year. This equates to £12,375 and represents a 6x ROI based on the licence fee paid.
Volunteer engagement
Volunteero has a myriad of easy to use and automated features which improve volunteer engagement.
Inactivity notifications - Volunteero can automatically remind volunteers to take actions and submit reports. You can set the period of inactivity after which notifications are sent and you can vary this depending on the activity type. This saves time for volunteer managers who would typically need to assess what hasn’t been done and chase individually.
“Yes, we had an issue with some volunteers forgetting to submit feedback reports resulting in hours of chasing volunteers. Now most volunteers submit feedback straight away and if not the system reminds them for us. We now spend very minimal time concerned about missing feedback.”
Usability - We are razor focussed on creating the most user friendly volunteer app possible. We have volunteers ranging in age from 16 up to 86. Many clients who come to Volunteero do so because they tell us their previous system was clunky and hard to use.
“Many of our volunteers do not feel particularly confident with technology, but now they are up and running with Volunteero they are enjoying using the system.”
Time saving
Onboarding - Volunteero allows for the creation of online volunteer registration and client referral forms. These can be shared via a link or embedded on your website in minutes. Allowing you to do away with paper forms and emails. You can receive submissions and track progress of applications all in one place.
“Volunteero has made it so much easier to track a volunteers onboarding due to the processes feature”
This allowed Racing Welfare to cut the time spent to onboard a single volunteer by over 40%.
Ease of access - Volunteero makes finding data and information you need simple. You can group volunteers and clients allowing you to report specifically on that group. You can also tag volunteers and clients with certain attributes, like “skills'' so you can find the right volunteers and clients in seconds.
“Volunteero is so simple to use after coming from such a clunky system. It's easy to navigate and find the information I need fast! I'm now able to spend less time on admin and more time working to grow our volunteering program.”
Oversight
Volunteers are often interacting with vulnerable people or undertaking sensitive tasks. It is because of this that being able to maintain constant oversight is essential.
Volunteer reports - Volunteers submit simple reports logging time and feedback through the app. These sit within the specific mission and within our reports page for volunteer managers to review and process.
“Time taken to review volunteer feedback from an activity is significantly reduced, from 1-2 hours a day to about 10 minutes.”
Activity tracking - Since volunteers engage with your charity through an app, everything is tracked and presented clearly in the management dashboard. You can see activity logs per volunteer, per mission and more. You can see which volunteers have been active, when they were last active and what exactly they have been up to.
“It has taken the worry out of missing something, whether it be a safeguarding concern or chasing for feedback.”
Safeguarding flags - Volunteers can include flags in their reports allowing them to raise a health concern or another action to staff. Staff can set their preferences to allow them to be notified instantly via email.
If staff take action on this, these actions can be logged using our report comment feature, the status of these can be updated, they can be assigned to others and staff can collaborate on resolutions in the platform.
“The safeguarding notifications have significantly improved our reaction time and mean we are able to assess a situation in record time.”
In short, not all volunteering platforms are made equal. We built the platform from the ground up in partnership with volunteer managers and volunteers to ensure we solved the problems faced by both. If you’d like to know more about how we can help supercharge your volunteering programs, please get in touch or book a demo. We’d love to speak to you.
