How organisations benefit from volunteers

Knowhow Nonprofit (2016) highlight how involving volunteers adds value to organisations and helps them to achieve their objectives. They say that involving volunteers can help organisations to:

  • Engage a more diverse range of skills, experience and knowledge
  • Reach more beneficiaries
  • Raise awareness about the organisation’s cause, its profile and what it does
  • Build relationships within the community and contribute to supporting others in the community. Providing volunteering opportunities, provides opportunities for social inclusion, skills development and potential routes to employment. There is also evidence that volunteering can help to improve health and wellbeing for individuals
  • Inform the development and delivery of activities, projects or services by bringing in new opinions, ideas or approaches. This can help organisations to adapt, stay relevant to what their beneficiaries and community need as well as identifying opportunities to improve what they do
  • Deliver service or projects in a more effective and efficient way which can help to save money and resources. However organisations do have to invest in supporting volunteering for this to work effectively.
(adapted from Knowhow Nonprofit, 2016)

3.2 Recruitment of volunteers

Starting point for recruiting