Volunteering Passport & Wellbeing Monitoring Tool Valuing Volunteer Voice and Wellbeing: Making New Connections, Enabling New Solutions

This is a report on the development of an App to support volunteers and their wellbeing in their engagement in volunteering. That App can help people make new connections to volunteering and during volunteering. That is why it can enable new solutions to recognised problems with engaging volunteers sustainably.

The App can be a product that facilitates working relations through different communication channels, supports volunteer wellbeing, and supports the current infrastructure in place for volunteers and managers. This proof of concept is a mobile application that has been co-designed with volunteers and managers, and has been designed in line with how they believe a digital product could live alongside their practice, addressing specific pillars of wellbeing and supporting a positive volunteer experience. The anonymised quantitative dataset from this platform provides a valuable public asset to support policy development by Government and the Third Sector.

Our research to develop this has included literature reviewing, stakeholder interviews, design workshops with volunteers and volunteer coordinators, and user feedback on wireframe designs. Significant outcomes are the capacity to capture voice and measure wellbeing in ways that align to and support more general ambitions for volunteering development, providing harmonisation and supporting policy implementation. Harmonisation and policy implementation can be achieved through amplifying volunteers' voices and facilitating a flow of dialogue both up and downstream and articulating the true value of volunteering in society. All of the specific pain points that our app has the potential to relieve and deliver can be associated with one of the five ‘volunteering outcomes’, namely: there is an environment and culture which celebrates volunteers and volunteering and all of its benefits. The App is not only innovative in itself. It is also potentially a way to support achieving National Outcomes and improving public services. Through enabling local delivery, social capital, reciprocity, ‘spillover’ effects, co-production and empowerment. These are where the connections between volunteering and policy intersect and are fundamental to improving public services.

In conclusion we set out a budget to develop the App, a technological solution to fit alongside the values of volunteers and managers, and produce a dataset of volunteering wellbeing which provides a valuable public asset to support policy development by Government and the Third Sector.