Volunteers in Community Archives

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"