• Resources: Supporting Volunteers

  • Recruiting, Retaining and Supporting Volunteers

    Volunteers play a crucial role co-ordinating and delivering community transport services across the UK. At the CTA, we recognise the contribution volunteers make to the sector and understand the importance of supporting our members to recruit and retain amazing volunteers.

    The suite of tools and resources on this page will explore third sector best practice in volunteer recruitment and retention. The suite includes a toolkit for trustee and volunteer recruitment, an additional guidance document on the retention of volunteers and other top tips. These tools are designed to enable community transport operators to bring on board the time, experience and skills of volunteers which will be vital to sustaining services in the short, medium and long term.

    In addition to this suite of resources, CTA Support & Engagement Executives and CTA’s Connecting Communities in Wales team are available to provide additional support, advice and guidance in relation to volunteer recruitment – you can get in touch with the team via advice@ctauk.org.

    Contents

    How to Guide – Volunteer Recruitment

    To attract and retain volunteers, it’s important to create a unique and purposeful experience to ensure volunteers remain committed to giving their time to your organisation. This document outlines a number of ways in which your organisation can recruit and retain volunteers to ensure the sustainability of services in the long term. It’s important to remember that the most essential resource of any organisation is its people.

    This resource was put together as part of CTA’s Connecting Communities in Wales Project.

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    Top Tips for Volunteer Retention

    We’ve put together some top tips to support you to retain existing and new volunteers. Once you have recruited the right volunteers for your organisation it is essential to deploy effective volunteer retention strategies that will keep your volunteers coming back to fulfil new and exciting opportunities for your organisation. Remember, it is the people that make an organisation great – the happiness and wellbeing of your volunteers should be placed at the forefront of all your decision-making processes.

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    Presentation on Recruiting and Retaining Volunteers

    This presentation is from a session at the CTA Roadshow in 2017 and looks at some ideas about putting together a volunteer recruitment strategy. The ideas are expanded on in the How to Guide and Top Tips document above.

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    Toolkit – Strategic Trustee and Volunteer Recruitment

    Having a strong and effective board is extremely important to ensure that your organisation meets its legal obligations and charitable objectives. As these positions are voluntary and can involve a significant time commitment, it can sometimes be difficult to recruit trustees with the skills, knowledge and experiences that you are looking for. We’ve put together a toolkit designed to support you when developing your trustee recruitment process.

    It’s a detailed toolkit looking in-depth and a number of issues so we’ve also produced a Top Tips document on the same issue that you can access below.

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    Top Tips – Trustee Recruitment

    This shorter document looks at some of our Top Tips on recruiting new trustees to your organisation. If you’re looking for a more in-depth toolkit on the subject, you can download our toolkit on strategic trustee and volunteer recruitment above.

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    Where else can you find support?

    As we continue to develop this suite of resources, please let us know at advice@ctauk.org if there is any other aspect of volunteer management which you would like us to focus on. Below are links to some external websites and resources which may be useful.

    Managing Volunteers:

    Managing Trustees:

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    More information

    CTA Advice Service: The CTA team are currently working remotely, so to ensure you speak to the right person first time, please email advice@ctauk.org to receive a call back for advice and support. Our advice service operates 10-4pm Monday-Friday.

    Advice Service Drop-in:  we’re still holding our weekly coronavirus online drop-in where members can join a video call to talk to the team and each other about the latest guidance and ask any questions. If you want to get involved, just email our advice team.

    If you feel like this page is missing something, or if there’s something you’d like to see, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the CTA advice service and let us know! 

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  • Related Information /

    You can find CTA's latest guidance for community transport at   ctauk.org/covid19-guidance/.

    You can also contact the CTA advice service if you need any further information. The CTA team are currently working remotely, so to ensure you speak to the right person first time, please email advice@ctauk.org to receive a call back.

    Our advice service operates 10-4pm Monday-Friday.  

Related Information /

You can find CTA's latest guidance for community transport at   ctauk.org/covid19-guidance/.

You can also contact the CTA advice service if you need any further information. The CTA team are currently working remotely, so to ensure you speak to the right person first time, please email advice@ctauk.org to receive a call back.

Our advice service operates 10-4pm Monday-Friday.