GROWING AND IMPROVING VOLUNTEERING

Volunteering and people development manager

Annie Bethell talks us through the English Heritage volunteering and participation strategy.

For over 25 years volunteer involvement has steadily grown at English Heritage, from our very first team of volunteers at Brodsworth Hall to one of our latest teams, at Wall Roman Site, which you can read about on page 22. Every time you volunteer at English Heritage you are making a difference, whether you volunteer from home, at a site, in a collection store or out and about in your local community. Your time, skills, support and absolute dedication inspire me every single day.

Strategic importance

The charity’s Strategic Plan places great value on volunteers and communities, and it recognises that they are crucial if we want to achieve more and open up more of our places. We’ve committed to recruiting more volunteers than ever before – 2,500 more to be precise – and we want to improve volunteer satisfaction from 76% to 80%. We are also aiming to increase our inclusion indicator score from 77% to 95%.

As I'm sure you can imagine, there are lots of other plans to help us achieve this, and I wanted to share an overview of our volunteering and participation strategy

Need To Know Find Out More

with you. We developed this strategy with input from you (mostly via the volunteer survey), volunteer leaders and managers, and our collective knowledge of what’s happening in the heritage and voluntary sectors as a whole.

Our vision for volunteering

By providing fulfilling and empowering volunteer experiences, English Heritage will increase its volunteering and participation reach, becoming an easily recognisable volunteer-involving organisation by 2025.

But what does that all mean for you?

This article could be a full book, so I’m going to do my best to keep it concise. You can read the full strategy on Fuse later in the summer and your manager can share it with you, but broadly, its focus is two main areas:

Volunteer satisfaction

Our regular volunteer surveys have given us a really fantastic insight into where you think we need to improve. Your feedback has formed the basis of what we will focus on to improve everyone’s experience.

In 2023/24 we will:

■ improve communications for volunteers at a local and national level, including making more effective use of digital tools like Fuse and WhatsApp, but also providing simple tools like newsletter templates

■ enable volunteers to have a voice throughout the organisation by supporting Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) networks and improving our ability to connect with you

■ improve all of our processes to make them easier, more relevant and smoother. This includes our expenses process, as well as how you might apply for another role

■ review and develop our recognition and appreciation for volunteers

■ improve our training offer for all volunteers

You can read the full volunteering and participation strategy on Fuse later in the summer.

■ improve how we make use of the skills you want to offer us.

Volunteer growth

We’re developing action plans for all locations to grow our numbers. These include a consideration of how we can appeal to people who, up until now, might not have felt that volunteering at English Heritage was for them.

We will need your help with this. We know that the world of volunteering is changing and people have more responsibilities and less time, so we will need to find new ways of reaching out to people and showing what we have to offer.

So, there’s plenty for us to be getting on with as we look to the future. I’m looking forward to going on this journey with you and hearing your thoughts when I see you at your site. Thank you. ■