Volunteers in Community Archives

Reimagining volunteering for archives

Broadly speaking, volunteering is unpaid activity, which is either:

• Voluntary work: Like paid work, but for which you give up your rights to pay. You may be doing it for a registered charity, public body or faith or community group
• Volunteering: Unlike paid work, in that it's not structured into roles. It has no chains of management, no fixed hours and no ongoing obligation

From our point of view as community archives, and using the definitions above:

• We consider helping to run an organisation or its projects to be voluntary work
• We consider helping people with events or similar to be volunteering

There are a few special cases you must know about:

• You cannot allow someone to volunteer in a structured role for a commercial organisation. This would breach the National Minimum Wage Act 1998. For example, if a retired worker agrees to manage the archives of a business, this must not become a 'structured role'. Otherwise, the person should be being paid by the business and paying any tax on their earnings.
• People in certain legal situations may have limits on how much volunteering they can do. For example, a person in receipt of certain benefits, or with no access to public funds (like people who are seeking asylum). Before you give someone a role, you should check with a welfare rights advisor that they have no limits on what they can do. Both you and your volunteer could face penalties if you get this wrong.

There are regulations around welfare rights advice. You can't provide it unless you are qualified. If in doubt refer your potential volunteer to a suitable organisation like the CBA, or refugees support bodies.

Are our members volunteers?

If your archive group is a membership organisation, your group members may not initially think of themselves as volunteers. This has advantages and disadvantages; but you might put some people off with the membership model.

You should talk in terms of volunteering with your organisation instead of joining it as a member. It may offer a way into your group for people who wouldn't normally see themselves as members.

Who volunteers and why?

You should try to develop a good understanding of what reasons people might have to volunteer. This will help you create opportunities and experiences that fulfil the needs of potential volunteers. This in turn can help you attract the right people.

You can identify several types of volunteer based on common characteristics:

• Traditional volunteers - Retirees and part-time workers
• Passion led volunteers - People who care most about an issue
• Wellbeing based volunteers - they may be socially isolated, have mental health challenges or be neurodivergent
• Career development focused volunteers - Students, young professionals and career changers

These types of volunteer fall into two broad categories:

• Development-focused volunteers - those who need to get something out of volunteering for their own personal future, like education, work experience or skills development
• Experiential volunteers - those who care more about the volunteering itself than any plan for their futures. This includes people who are volunteering for wellbeing reasons, and ones led by a passion

Understanding why people volunteer and what your organisation can offer potential volunteers can help you adapt your messaging and help you recruit the right people.

Find out what you already know

Before recruiting new volunteers, you should establish what you know about your current volunteering programme.

You can ask new volunteers about their motivations and skills at the recruitment stage. You need to do this without either excessive questioning or making assumptions about people. This means it can be harder to do with existing volunteers who have been with you for some time, especially if that isn't something you normally do.

Ideas for collecting baseline information:

1. Have a conversation with your group and make some notes about what you know about your current volunteers. How do you collect that information now? It is reliable?
2. Be honest - if you need to create a baseline from scratch tell your members this. They will understand
3. Host a brief discussion of how you could establish a baseline - perhaps using mind mapping techniques.
4. Document the state of your existing knowledge and use it in your gap identification work.

Identifying your needs

This will be the starting point for many groups. We suggest that you take note of the skills you already have, and the tasks you need completing. The way to do that might be through a formal survey exercise for a large organisation, or just a conversation for a small one. This will allow you to know what your needs are.

Then you can ask:

• What can you offer someone, to convince them to give you what you need?
• What kinds of people might want to do these tasks, and why?

You should also consider your volunteers' transferable skills. For example:

• Instead of thinking your treasurer needs to be an accountant, it could be anyone with experience of managing money
• Instead of thinking that you need a volunteer good with technology to manage social media, it could be someone who can train your existing volunteers in how to do that

When you know what skills you need, you can work out the roles you would like to fill. Then you can work out how to make them attractive to the right person.

Policies

You should develop a volunteer policy. When creating your policy, think about diversity and widening participation. This means thinking about how you can remove barriers to make volunteering accessible to everyone.

This might include things like paying for travel and using inclusive language. You could look back at your baselining exercise to see if there are potentially excluded groups. Think about what might be stopping them from volunteering.

Here are some examples of policies for different sized organisations, and some links to guidance on best practice:

• Larger organisations: Norfolk Record Office volunteer policy 
• Smaller organisations: Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society volunteer policy
• Useful support, from Voluntary Norfolk and Sheffield Volunteer Centre

You will also need to research a suitable privacy statement, and data control arrangements, based on who you are, and what information you are recording. Good advice can be found online at resourcecentre.org.uk. All the other policies around working with volunteers (Health & Safety, Equal Opportunities etc.) are things your organisation should already have in place. Separate guidance should be sought if you are still developing these.

Recruitment Documents

There are several documents you can use to help you recruit volunteers. You can make these into a recruitment pack if required.

Role Descriptions

When you're thinking about more structured voluntary work, you should make the documentation formal.

A role description can help set clear expectations and make everyone feel more comfortable. Role descriptions work best if you recruit to the role. Each description should include the essential and desirable skills, just like the Person Specification for a paid job. This might be particularly important when the role is a highly responsible one, for instance when managing others.

Application Forms

You can use an application form, especially if you expect high numbers of applicants. You can create online application forms using services like Google Forms, Jot and Microsoft Forms.

The form should collect the information you need to make a fair selection, but not show any information which might identify the applicant. At this stage, you should avoid recording personal information like age, ethnicity, pregnancy and parenting, marital status, gender, or sexuality.

You should make it clear where the form goes when it is complete - with options for post, email and electronic submission if possible, and you should indicate the timeline for your response.

Key points of receiving and reviewing applications:

• Take your time
• Don't decide immediately
• Respond to applicants when you say you will
• Inform unsuccessful applicants in a timely manner - even if there are a lot of them
• Make sure there is a stage of offer, and of acceptance - so that both you and the volunteer have a chance to reconsider
• Make sure the volunteer can check back to see what they have agreed to - either in an email, in print or on a website

If you run an ongoing programme, keep the information you collect on file, but don't forget the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). You will need to include signed permission to do that in the form and delete information you don't have that permission for.

This form can be stand alone, or you could combine it with your volunteer record process.

Volunteer Agreements/Registration Forms

Anyone you recruit needs to know what you expect of them. They will need to provide you with the information you need to keep them safe and to communicate with them.

Whichever recruitment method you use, it's important for you to collect essential contact and medical information. You must keep GDPR requirements in mind when you are doing this. You also need to keep this information secure and make it clear to volunteers who will have access to it.

You should aim for some kind of formal volunteering agreement with your volunteers. The key things it needs to achieve are:

• Make sure you know the best way to get in touch with each volunteer, so that you can get information to them if anything changes
• •Note any information your funders might need, now or in the future (For instance diversity monitoring can take place here)
• Include Health & Safety and Emergency contact information
• Allow them to tick or sign to say they understand their role, know who their point of contact is, and agree to follow your policies
• Include a fixed end or review date - depending on the nature of the placement

By doing all of this in a formal way, you should avoid misunderstandings, and both you and the volunteer will know what they need to do if the placement isn't working out.

New Sources of Volunteers

Advertising

Having developed your voluntary roles, you need to advertise them. You can start with your existing team, or even approach people directly. Sometimes, you will need to recruit from further afield. There are a whole range of local and national resources for advertising for volunteers, some of which are:

• Norfolk volunteering portal, Simply Connect
• Do It Volunteering
• UEA Volunteering through MyCareerCentral
• NUA Careers
• Use Social Media - Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others
• Look out for volunteering fairs and events

Jobseekers

This refers to people experiencing long-term unemployment, or barriers to getting into work. Volunteering can allow these people to develop skills in a supportive environment, whilst contributing to your organisation. To contact people in this position, you need to work with those who support them. You could consider:

• Contact people though unemployment support schemes
• Tailoring your advertisements towards jobseekers
• Libraries and local authorities, who often support jobseekers

Be aware that jobseekers may have to leave you at short notice if they get paid work.

Jobseekers tend to have specific needs around volunteering:

• Training (formal or informal) is very important for jobseekers - you need to offer clear workplace skills
• Defined roles are helpful for jobseekers, because of how they can use them on their CVs
• Think about how and when you can offer references and be clear about it

Students

Many colleges and universities have a professional service in place to help with recruiting and supporting student volunteers. Some may have recognition or accreditation to motivate students. UEA, NUA, City College, College of West Anglia & Easton College all have formal support for student volunteering.

Advantages of working with students include:

• There is a large number of students
• Students have a wide range of backgrounds and life experiences, and many have been in work
• Students are usually open to training and receptive to new ideas
• Students can bring a range of academic and specialist skills to your organisations, often with professional supervision built in.

There can be some things you will need to consider when recruiting students:

• Students will be able to dedicate less time to volunteering during term time, and more time during the holidays. You need to plan tasks accordingly
• Students are often new to the area, and don't have their own transport. They may get lost trying to find you
• Students may not be able to volunteer for as long as other types of volunteers
• You will usually have to go to them to recruit them. They won't usually come to you
• Sometimes your existing volunteers may not like working with students or have unrealistic expectations of them. You may need to manage expectations

Some institutions organise more formal workplace internships and placements. You should be aware of the conditions for those, and unpaid options are generally only open to registered charities.

For these reasons, working closely with a college or university could help you find volunteers over many years. Talk to the person in charge of volunteering at the college or university to see if there is a good fit between their students and your needs.

This advice focuses on volunteers from college or university who are adults. Working with people under 18 is a bit different and requires a certain skill set. If your organisation wants to work with children and young people, volunteers will need to have a DBS check. This is free for volunteers. You will also need to put safeguarding processes in place.

Micro Volunteering

Micro volunteering is a much less structured form of volunteering, with less paperwork. It is purely task-based volunteering which can cover two different kinds of tasks:

• Practical one-off tasks such as boxing documents, removing steel paperclips or filing press cuttings
• Taster activities: small projects designed to introduce your work

Micro volunteering could be suitable for people not looking to sign up for long-term volunteering. When looking for these volunteers:

• Don't seek a long-term volunteer
• Advertise individual tasks that need completing, on or by a fixed date
• Advertise widely, and outside your usual networks

Corporate Volunteering

You can sometimes work with employers, especially large employers, to access volunteers directly from their employees. This is often on their paid work time as part of a company's 'Corporate Social Responsibility' programme.

With corporate volunteering you need a compelling reason which is often working with a large employer based in your community. It might also be around an issue or cause. Sometimes it might be where a company needs to reduce reputational damage - you need to be careful of this last one, to protect your own reputation.

Corporate projects are:

• Often one day/weekend projects
• Generally not highly skilled, often manual tasks
• Can become an annual or ongoing relationship
• Often a good photo opportunity

Pro Bono Work

Pro Bono work is when someone provides you with a service they would normally charge for but gives up their fee. You might request pro bono work when:

• The work is for the public good
• You can't afford to pay for it
• Having the work done professionally is legally required

Pro Bono work for charities usually comes into play when you are undertaking a large project. For example, if you're building a new archive store, you might decide to approach architects, quantity surveyors and structural engineers. It's also possible in financial services as well as in the law.

Key Considerations:

• Be clear at the outset that you are looking for pro bono work
• Allow a long deadline
• Choose larger practices with more capacity
• Be aware that you are more likely to be offered time from junior partners - working pro bono is often a career progression step for chartered professionals

If you find you are losing volunteers, it's worth thinking about why.

Sometimes it's just normal for people to move on, and regularly accepting new volunteers can help bring in new ideas and increase diversity.

Volunteers moving on is only a problem if you think people are leaving you when they'd rather not, or because they feel unsatisfied. Having some one-to-one meetings, occasional group meetings, or email conversations, could help you find out if and why volunteers are unhappy.

Some concerns you might come across could include:

• It's not meeting their needs - recap on how well you understand their needs, were they realistic?
• It has become boring or repetitive - can you mix up the tasks better? Do you need a new project?
• They feel that the management is too much or not effective - review processes, use technology, and make it easier for people
• Their circumstances have changed - can you help? Be more flexible? Or do they need other support in their lives?
• It was just the right time for that volunteer to move on - sometimes it is

It's increasingly common for volunteers to come in and out of organisations more frequently. Accepting this helps to accommodate new and more diverse sources of volunteers.

Various things can drive these comings and goings:

• Working on cyclical events - for instance a seasonal programme
• Project based working, where the timescale is set at the start
• Student life, which has its own annual rhythm and course length restrictions
• Family life - the need to care for children/grandchildren in the summer holidays for instance
• Changes of the seasons - more people want to volunteer in January, and in spring. Fewer people do in high summer and in cold wet weather.

Cycles and replacement

Seasonal or project-based working, or the requirements of student or family life, can create a natural cycle of volunteers coming and going. The important thing is not to treat this as a negative.

Plan for recruiting to replace volunteers in advance - use internal and external recruitment:

• Recruit to a timetable, starting well ahead of your need
• Train well in advance, but not so far ahead that people forget the induction
• Make the best of your time by training volunteers in groups
• Provide everything as a takeaway resource: The Volunteer Pack
• Sign off on skills as you train them
• If your volunteers are jobseekers or students, you could consider adding a Customer Services qualification, delivered with a partner

Consider this project-based approach, and how it might relate to the work your group does. There may be some parts of your work which you could think of as individual projects. It may be worth thinking a bit about quiet periods throughout the year, and whether they represent time that everyone needs to recover and plan, or whether you need to fill them with additional projects.

It's important to note that rewarding volunteers isn't about money. You must be very careful providing material rewards to volunteers. HMRC could see anything with a financial or equivalent value as pay, and this could get both you and your volunteers into trouble.

This does not relate to volunteer expenses, which you can cover on a 'real value' basis, to remove barriers to volunteering with you. Types of reward you could offer volunteers:

• Training and qualifications
• Learning and skills, certificated or not
• Award schemes, certificates and badges
• Social events and celebrations

Rewards and/or recognition

The type of reward or recognition which is most successful will depend very much on the motivation of the volunteer. That could be:

• Through things that are useful to a development driven volunteer, like skills and qualifications
• Things which enhance the social reward of volunteering for an experiential volunteer

Or a blend of the two.

Development focused volunteers need ways to demonstrate their learning and experience. That could be a formal system or just your willingness to write references.

Record & Reflection is key to this. You should encourage your volunteers to keep some sort of log in which to record what they have learned or been trained to do.

If they ask for guidance, you can ask them to think in terms of CARL:

• Context - where was I based?
• Action - what did I do there?
• Result - what happened or changed?
• Learning - what did I learn from that?

Documentation & Verification

The most useful rewards for development-based volunteers come from the training you can offer them.

Accredited and non-accredited training

You might be able to offer you volunteers qualifications. These must be from a suitable awarding body and usually cost money. For development-focused volunteers however, they can be much more valuable. For example, many public facing volunteering roles would easily provide enough evidence for level 1 or 2 NVQs in Customer Service.

You can also provide certification of any training you offer, to give your volunteers evidence to use in future. This can be in the form of a training/CPD log book, or as certificates for individual training packages. You can find free templates for these online.

References

References are important, because they are proof of people's time spent with you. There are several kinds

• Simple references: Just a note of dates and role title. This is usually what you do if you don't want to actively recommend the volunteer or didn't know them for long
• Specific reference: For a job or course the person is applying for or has been provisionally accepted onto. It is addressed to someone specific, and goes into detail about tasks, strengths, etc. It may respond to provided questions or be a form you need to fill in
• General reference: For people who have not yet found the opportunity they want to apply for

These can be combined in official schemes, like volunteer passports, skills passports and similar. This could be something specific to your organisation, or something organised across a sector or a region.

One option in Norfolk is the Norfolk Volunteer Passport, provided by Norfolk Adult Learning and Voluntary Norfolk. It's suitable for a wide variety of general volunteering, but there are also specific passports for some subject areas and, if you are a larger organisation, you might consider developing one of your own.

Visit the Voluntary Norfolk website for more information.

Community & Celebration

Experiential volunteers will not usually ask for reward, but by celebrating their work you can create an atmosphere in which they feel valued.

You should always try to:

• Hold end of project and social events, and make these separate from work time
• Make breaks and chats part of the timetable for working sessions
• If you are a larger group, consider mentor and buddy type arrangements
• Hold regular celebratory events - for instance for Volunteers Week, at seasonal holidays, and to mark anniversaries of long service.

This kind of celebration also offers excellent opportunities for publicity which you can use for future recruitment. If you are working on a project-based system, you can also use these events as part of project evaluation.

Trust & Responsibility

Some more informal rewards include making sure that people feel in control of their volunteering, and that they feel trusted with an appropriate degree of responsibility. There are lots of ways to go about this.

• Give volunteers, especially as their experience grows, the ability to design their own work whenever possible
• Have a formal suggestions process
• If you have a separate committee, make sure volunteers know how it works and how to get in touch with them

Visibility

• Make volunteer profiles and voices part of your marketing and publications
• Always use the word "volunteering"

This section of the toolkit should have covered:

• Understanding of what volunteer needs and motivations might be, for different kinds of volunteer
• Learning how to create a baseline, to understand your current volunteers' needs, motivations and feelings
• How to identify your volunteering needs, by undertaking a skills audit
• How to seek out new kinds of volunteers who might meet those needs
• Simple ways of improving your volunteer management practices
• Simple ways of making various kinds of volunteers feel rewarded by their volunteering