5.1 ‘Enjoy it, love it, be happy!’

Listening to and learning from volunteers will help you to identify where an individual’s expectations are not being met, and if they need any additional support to ensure that they continue to be happy. Pro viding appropriate opportunities for volunteers to express their views, including listening to and valuing their experience, lets volunteers know how important they are, while improving the effectiveness of your group or organisation.

Volunteers are often the face of a group or an organisation, interacting with people on a day-to-day basis, dealing with requests or complaints, raising revenue, providing information, care or support. This means volunteers have a special insight into what a group or an organisation does, how well it is performing and what it could do better.

In this video, James talks about getting feedback from volunteers during a national roadshow, which led to improvements in how volunteers can share ideas and learn from each other.

Download this video clip.Video player: James, Volunteering Manger, LGBT Youth Scotland. All rights reserved.

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Transcript: James, Volunteering Manger, LGBT Youth Scotland. All rights reserved.

James

So we often ask volunteers for feedback or volunteers will give feedback, and it’s important when we can that we act on that feedback and we are seen to act on that feedback. A really nice memory I had was that recently we had a volunteering Roadshow where we went around the country with a few of the managers, just talking to volunteers, brining volunteers together. And a bit of feedback we got from a few of our volunteers was, it is great when we get these opportunities to bring all us together form different parts of the country, and so much happens when ideas come up, when we share ideas, we learn from each other and we learn about best practice and we find out about the skills that people have. But it just seems that we do this once or twice a year, wouldn’t it be great that we could do this throughout the year. So we thought about that, what we introduced was an online portal where our volunteers can share information, they can stay in touch with each other, even if they are in geographical areas. So for example if a particular volunteer, maybe, develops a works shop that they run with young people, and it’s being really successful, they might be able to share that with somebody hundreds of miles away, they can upload there materials and say here is the workshop, here is what I have developed, here’s instructions on how to run it, see how you get on. It’s a really nice way of volunteers to stay in touch as well and we encourage that informal chat, just to stay in touch with people that you have maybe met at a training event or a conference.

End transcript: James, Volunteering Manger, LGBT Youth Scotland. All rights reserved.

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James, Volunteering Manger, LGBT Youth Scotland. All rights reserved.

For some volunteers, a sense of enjoyment and satisfaction in their role can also come from interaction with service users rather than from their own progression. In this video, Randi talks about gaining a great deal from both the communications he has with LGBT Youth Scotland, and the young people that attend the groups.

Download this video clip.Video player: Randi, Volunteer, LGBT Youth Scotland. All rights reserved.

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Transcript: Randi, Volunteer, LGBT Youth Scotland. All rights reserved.

Randi

The development comes with the training and the communication that I have kept with staff, even when being back home and the state’s still checking in on the centre and see how it is going. But I guess that before, all the original development comes with interacting with the kids and certain groups have really inspired me to be more of myself and you know, it pushed me into coming out more of my own coming out process.

End transcript: Randi, Volunteer, LGBT Youth Scotland. All rights reserved.

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Randi, Volunteer, LGBT Youth Scotland. All rights reserved.

Rebecca highlights that new opportunities are often offered, and she feels able to suggest ideas.

Download this video clip.Video player: Rebecca, Volunteer, GALE. All rights reserved.

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Transcript: Rebecca, Volunteer, GALE. All rights reserved.

Rebecca

It’s like anything, you just work up, you build up confidence and you ask if you can maybe have a go at something else, or more often or not you are given the opportunities which is even better. You’re offered to do this or that, and that’s what’s so brilliant, that there are so many opportunities to do different things.

End transcript: Rebecca, Volunteer, GALE. All rights reserved.

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Rebecca, Volunteer, GALE. All rights reserved.

An important aspect of ensuring people are happy whilst volunteering is to be aware that, as much as you want to offer opportunities for further engagement to volunteers, you don’t want to ask too much of them either. It is detrimental to a volunteer’s health and wellbeing if they take on too much, so you need to support volunteers to ensure this doesn’t happen.

You also need to check in with volunteers to ensure that their experience continues to meet their expectations. For instance, the Kilmaurs Gala Committee said, ‘If people are struggling with the role we will change it, or we will all help them achieve it. We all get to know each other’s job because we have to step in and help each other out.’

In this video, Lisa talks about how they all need to look out for each other as they are all volunteers.

Download this video clip.Video player: Lisa, Co-convenor, Polbeth and West Calder Community Garden. All rights reserved.

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Transcript: Lisa, Co-convenor, Polbeth and West Calder Community Garden. All rights reserved.

Lisa

Because we are quite an unusual organisation in that we have volunteers at every level, running the organisation in a kind of governance, the day-to-day, the kinda work on the ground. Absolutely everything is done by volunteers and sometimes a lot of that is the same volunteers working at lots of different levels in the organisation, and there is an opportunity to pile on too much pressure or people to take on more than a lot that they can manage. You know, there is a lot of enthusiasm, there is a lot of passion for the project and for the things that are happening but sometimes people forget that they also need to have a life or sometimes their circumstances change, they’re dealing with illness. And so we’ve always really been aware of that and we have always tried to support each other through difficult periods and stressful periods, and so you know, invariably someone will say to you “you know I think you are doing too much” or “do you want to have a break” or “can we rearrange our work schedule”. I think we have to be aware of that because we rely on our volunteers to keep going as an organisation, and we are providing all these opportunities for other people to be outdoors and be healthy and we are sometimes we think, we’re not really thinking about ourselves. We need to protect ourselves so that we are able to still deliver this valuable resource to the community and so that we are trying to do more, having events, bringing volunteers together socially, it’s not all work based, it’s not all task based and planning, it’s actually coming together because we actually like each other’s company.

End transcript: Lisa, Co-convenor, Polbeth and West Calder Community Garden. All rights reserved.

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Lisa, Co-convenor, Polbeth and West Calder Community Garden. All rights reserved.