Volunteers should receive a full induction and a copy of your volunteer handbook to feel confident in your processes.  You can also share this Introductory video as part of the process:

Volunteer Handbook Introduction

It’s vital to ensure everyone working on and advocating for your project understands the importance of managing risks, maintaining the items, and reminding members to use them safely. This includes reminding borrowers to read any instructions and to use recommended PPE. Insurers often require this.

You may wish to offer volunteer training as a development opportunity and enable them to engage more fully with the project, for example, through PAT-test training.

When welcoming a new volunteer to your branch or project, have a volunteer induction process to ensure everyone receives the necessary information about processes and risk mitigation.

Ensure that you share your operational policies with them, including but not limited to Safeguarding, Health and Safety, and GDPR.

Depending on your volunteers' roles, they will have access to data while using borrowing software, so ensuring they understand their responsibility around maintaining data privacy is essential.

Each volunteer plays a crucial role in your project. Providing them with some background information about how it began, its vision, and the background of the Benthyg Cymru network will not only help them feel confident talking to others about it but also ensure they feel an integral part of it.

We highly value the time and effort our volunteers contribute. Keeping track of the number of volunteers and the hours they have volunteered not only fulfils reporting requirements of funders but also helps us demonstrate the impact you are already making. This can also facilitate the administration of any time credits system you use.

You may want(or need) to create a time sheet for each volunteer, share it with them individually and ask them to update it themselves.

You could then review time sheets regularly and combine the data into one master spreadsheet to help with your reporting.

Google Drive is useful for creating documents and spreadsheets that you can share with your team.

If your funder does require you to report on volunteer time, they may provide a template for tracking it. If not, we have included three basic options in the downloads below for different formats you can adapt to suit your project.

Retaining Volunteers:

Communicating with your volunteers is key to retaining them. There may be periods when there isn’t much to do. This is natural, but remember to keep your volunteers updated.

You may want to set up a volunteer WhatsApp group to create a feeling of community.

Other than making a good first impression and creating an inclusive and positive space, we believe it is important to provide volunteers with a good balance of responsibility.  

Ensure the tasks are engaging and not too little, that there isn’t enough to keep them occupied, as this will disengage them. Equally, too many tasks will make them feel overburdened.

Both situations may result in volunteers not returning. It is a fine balance; with our experience, we can provide further information on this, along with ongoing support and guidance.

Ideally, you will be able to create a paid role for someone, to ensure regular opening hours and a consistent service, and co-ordinate your volunteers effectively.

‍