The RAF (Royal Air Force) Museum, with locations in London, Stafford and Cosford, is dedicated to preserving the history of British aviation and the RAF. Its primary goals include educating the public about aviation history, inspiring future generations, and commemorating the contributions and sacrifices of RAF personnel.
Volunteers play a crucial role in achieving these objectives. They contribute in various roles including Visitor Services, Archives and Collections, Maintenance and Restoration and Events and Outreach.
In the past, the RAF Museum used Better Impact to manage their volunteers but typically both the RAF Museum team and their volunteers found challenges with using the system, often finding it clunky and difficult to navigate. What’s more, their app is not widely used due to lacking functionality and an easy-to-use interface which meant the RAF museum was reliant on volunteers logging in from desktop/laptop computers which tends to lower engagement. Many refused to use Better Impact, some signed in and out on paper and a volunteer inputted their hours to the system, others didn’t report or sign in at all. The team couldn't rely on the data they had.
Highlights
- Staff time required to onboard volunteers cut by 75%
- Time to onboard volunteers cut by 50%
- Improved expense claim process
- Reports are being submitted by those who didn’t before
Onboarding
This is one of the areas where the RAF Museum have seen the biggest improvements. Volunteero offers a suite of easy-to-use and fully customisable features to support the onboarding process for all volunteers. Opportunities can be published immediately on the RAF museum website to share information about the available roles. Applicants hit “apply now” and complete a form designed in Volunteero by the RAF team. Submissions are then managed through a process created by the team for that role so the team can see exactly where each applicant is in the process.
Better Impact was not as customisable and required volunteers to create an account before applying which was a barrier to entry and also meant the team had many volunteer accounts of those who never actually went through the process.
Volunteero has cut the time to onboard a volunteer in half! In a world where time and patience are often limited, this is vitally important to ensure more people make it through the entire process. What's more the staff hours dedicated to onboarding a single applicant have been cut by 75%. What would you do if we gave you back all that time?
Here is what Dara Howley had to say “Feedback from our volunteer line managers is that the "process" function makes things much clearer for them so the collaborative nature of onboarding is no longer messy and onboarding moves faster. It's great to be able to auto send new submission notices directly to the line manager to take action on.”
Management
The day-to-day management of volunteers is often fraught with inefficiencies. Emails to manage rotas, reminding volunteers of upcoming events, capturing data… all these manual tasks add up to a great deal of time that could be better spent on more impactful work.
With Volunteero, the volunteer experience is the top priority. They use our mobile or web app to take control of their own volunteering activities, communicate with other volunteers, log time and feedback and much more. This relieves the volunteer management team of much of the burden and improves volunteer engagement. Dara states “It's overall much smoother, and Volunteero is much more user-friendly than our previous system”
Volunteers are able to control their own schedule and pick the shifts that suit them best. When the RAF team have shifts that really need filling, they “have been successful using chat to fill shifts”
Capturing data such as volunteering time and feedback has always been a challenge. With their previous system, volunteers found it time-consuming and would disengage or as Dara puts it “some boycotted logging reports entirely. I can't rely on the data we have gathered for the last five years at all.”
With Volunteero, the RAF Museum can curate the report questions asked after different activity types to ensure the collection of the most relevant information. Making these reports available to submit from the app, often immediately after they finish their volunteering, means it is easier to do and more volunteers log feedback. Dara saw a big uptick across all volunteers, “reports are being submitted by the boycotters now. The Insights is great as I can see the percentage of volunteers who are doing this. We are beginning work on picking up those who are not and getting Line managers to support this by encouraging/asking more often.”
When asked about the overall impact of Volunteero on the day-to-day management of volunteers, Dara said “So far it's been the Processes that have made the biggest difference to line managers. Migrating offered a chance to reset and get more volunteers reporting hours and knowing many of those who hadn't before are now doing so is fab”
Expenses
Often volunteers are paying for things like travel out of pocket in order to volunteer. Needless to say, facilitating swift reimbursements is a key part of providing a great volunteering experience. With Volunteero this is again available for volunteers in the app meaning they can be submitted at any time, on the go and allow the capture of the information and even allowing volunteers to snap a picture of any evidence. Dara says that “many volunteers find using Receipts to submit expenses suits them much better than submitting the form we provided by email”
Community
Building a sense of community among volunteers is super important but often poses a challenge when they are spread over various locations or even volunteer remotely. Volunteero offers a fully GDPR-compliant instant messaging feature native in the platform. Organisations can create dynamic group chats which are only accessible to relevant groups of volunteers. Many volunteers find using Receipts to submit expenses suits them much better than submitting the form we provided by email.
The use of the chat feature at RAF is beginning to pick up and Dara hopes that in time this can become the primary channel for communication. Dara says “I have been encouraging volunteers to be social there and some have been sharing good tv programmes or websites which I hope will continue”
Not only does the chat feature offer a means of building a GDPR-compliant digital space for volunteers to interact, but it can also be very handy from an operational perspective when trying to coordinate volunteers. For example, Dara states that “Line managers of front-of-house volunteers have been successful using chat to fill shifts”
We are excited to see the volunteering program at the RAF Museum go from strength to strength.
If you would like to save time and improve your volunteer experience, get in touch today or book a demo on our website.
