Social enterprises rely heavily on volunteers to provide the necessary resources they need to maintain valuable community based services. High rates of volunteers and a scarcity of resource to offer inductions for new volunteers is an issue for many community services. Coupled with and anticipated move towards a more outcome focused approach to the reporting of services, looking at the impact of volunteering over numerical metrics, offers an opportunity to think differently about how volunteers can be supported to to transition into a new role.

In this project we aim to explore possible tools that front line volunteers can use to support them into volunteering and to gather feedback from their service users through good engagement. Volunteers and volunteer organisations see the opportunity to develop supports that can help volunteers to handle new and unfamiliar situations and support them to engage with users and gather feedback on service experience.

Over a series of workshops we will work with volunteers and volunteer organisations to co-design tools that can take information (such as policy and procedure) and advice (such as engaging with users) and consolidate it in a creative and engaging resource for volunteers to help them engage with service users and show the impact of their work.