FAQs
How do institutions assess barriers to volunteering?
Staffordshire University Students Union
If you’re looking at barriers to volunteering, having a critical eye on your service using Gaskin’s eight pressure points may be a useful exercise (particularly with a focus group!) It isn’t wholly accurate for SU volunteering as we cover so much, but very useful to know and adapt for yourselves.
The eight pressure points are:
The idea being if a volunteer feels these eight points are done well, then they will have confidence in the service and the idea of volunteering and theoretically be a long term volunteer! More info can be found on the report: A Choice Blend, by Gaskin
IVR
The report Exploring Impacts of Volunteering on University Students in London offers some insight
UELSU
Use this survey
What is the status of RAG (society, programme, etc) and how is it administered?
University of Derby Students' Union
At Derby we separated RAG off as a Standing Committee (along with d:one our radio station and dusted our magazine) two years ago and as Societies and Activities Coordinator I oversee the support of RAG. Generally it works quite well for us as our RAG was small and we are still building the culture up of RAG. It allows us to give them more guidance/support and as we recruit the committee through an interview process we are more able to ensure it is led by the best people for the job. You can find the committee recruitment handbook here.
Staffordshire University Students' Union
Our RAG is now written in to our constitution so even though they exist as a society (like our student media groups, also written into our constitution) we support them as a society but try to encourage them to be the ideas people. They function as a society but use a lot of the resources of the volunteer scheme and work closely with us for support as they are very small at the moment.
Hull University Union
We have RAG as a standing committee at Hull. It sits in the Community Zone and is supported by the VP Community sabb and the Student Activities Co-ordinator. All money raised by students, whether societies, teams, RAG committee etc. is paid in and donated through the RAG account so we can keep track of how much money has been raised by students at the university. The Chair RAG is voted in as part of the student officer elections in February. I don’t know if it’s the case with you, but here all societies are required to charge a joining fee to members so for us it wouldn’t be fair to require people to pay out in order to raise money.
What models or methods of monitoring and evaluation do you use for student-led projects?
NCCPE
Have written a guide to Student-Led Project Evaluation.
NUS
Is working with NEF (new Economics Foundation) on a wider piece of work around impact of students’ union, and one of the elements they’re designing is a way that students’ union can assess their impact in the community.
The research objectives are:
· To develop a research methodology and framework that allows SUs to measure and demonstrate impact;
· Build capacity within NUS and SUs so that they can use and roll out this methodology without relying on outside consultants in the longer term;
· Provide an analysis of the data on outcomes from this research with particular reference to how this data can be used to ensure sustainability, improve financial stability, enhance reputation and communicate the public benefit of SUs.
The first element of the framework should be ready by the start of the 2013-14 academic year.
Bristol
Work with students to develop custom monitoring and evaluation toolkits for each project, which students fill in and submit to staff on a monthly basis. The information collected is used to help with funding bids and to measure community impact. The evaluations are based are Children in Need evaluation tools. Two sample toolkits can be found here.
Manchester
Use the Social Return on Investment Model. They also make use of NCVO resources, including the Impacts Pyramid.
UELSU
Asks all students who receive SU funding to fill in a form in relation to their project's impact , which can be found here.
They also require that students design and complete their own monitoring and evaluation system, whcih is generally a combination of budget sheets, a feedback form for clients and volunteers, and some more creative methods (eg: getting young children to make drawings about their favourite parts or creating before and after photo montages). This is supported by training in budget management and monitoring and evaluation.
With regard to budgets, students bank through the SU but must update their own budgets. They create their budget sheets from a template at the first training session. All the budgets are kept online so that the SU can check on them or pass them on to new students if the ones in charge suddenly disappear.
In terms of monitoring and evaluation, we ask that all forms and results are either stored on our surveymonkey account, or on Google Drive and shared with us. In this way we can see results as they come in. For all other feedback the coordinators seek out or receive, we ask that they document it and send it along with their periodic reports.
What social networking do universities use to support student volunteering?
The University of Manchester
Use Facebook and Twitter as a way of informing students of latest opportunities and events that may be of interest to them. They have the two linked so that by updating Twitter (@mlpvolunteering) Facebook is automatically updated. Having experimented with different ways what they have found works best is to have a fan page set up. They currently have over 500 students, who have joined it. Staff don't use their personal accounts.
Leeds Metropolitan University
Use Facebook and various blog sites. They have a Facebook fan page and also each group of volunteers set up a group page - this is sometimes a much better way to keep in touch than email! They moderate people's comments on the FB fan page from time to time just in case. Generally they‘ve found Twitter to be too much effort but the library and SU use it and have a live feed into the student portal. They also use blogs. Click here for an example. They're really useful for volunteers, who go overseas but for some projects they‘ve had to slightly edit references to things that didn't seem appropriate like volunteering with terrible hangovers! Also they have a Health and Safety team, who have sometimes picked up on issues that they've noticed in photos! This isn't really social networking but meetomatic is brilliant for organising dates for meetings with the students. It’s similar to doodle.
Student Hubs
Click here for their brilliant guide to Twitter. Bear in mind, only last week Twitter have released a new version (#newtwitter) so this is slightly out of date.
University of Dundee
Use social networking for the university's peer welcoming, buddying and mentoring scheme - Peer Connections – (group and page). They give guidance to volunteers, who are connected to fellow students to do not add them as friends but instead get them to join the group page and keep in touch that way. This is less risky from the point of view of the volunteer as they are not then in a situation of disclosing personal info to people they hardly know and maintains an appropriate boundary. If volunteers want to use it between them that is a personal decision.
London Metropolitan University
Use both Facebook and Twitter. In Facebook they started with a group. When pages were introduced, they tried to “migrate” and bring all the group members to become fans of the page. Now, they mostly use the page, which gets updated from Twitter using TweetDeck (more info on TweetDeck in the Student Hubs Twitter guide above). Click here for a small document summarising the purpose and use of Facebook & Twitter and how they could be applied to the university’s Department of Student Services. The university’s Faculty of Computing also uses Second Life. They have an island and provide some useful information for prospective and current students. The volunteering team are considering ways of engaging with Second Life but they’ve only just started on it.
University of Cumbria Students' Union
See their Facebook group here.
What level of child protection training do you offer to volunteers and how do you offer it?
Lancaster University Student’s Union
Safeguarding professional from Lancashire County Council delivers training to staff members each year. From this, we then devise our own training to deliver to all 700 students that volunteer with children and young people (and vulnerable adults where necessary). This training is also agreed to by the head teachers/DSPs of the local schools that we work with.
You can find a copy of the slides we use for this training, along with our Safeguarding Policy, on our website. Please note though that these slides are only used as a visual aid to content we deliver, rather than covering everything (for example, there are a lot of ‘dilemmas’ and scenarios missing from those slides).
Student Community Action, Durham University
We provide a Level 1 Online Child Safeguarding course to all of our volunteers who are working with children. We access this through the local council, who offer the course to all voluntary groups in the area.
Pro: The course was already established so it requires very little work on our behalf.
Con: We don’t administer the sign ups ourselves, we have to email them to the course administrator in the council, which does make keeping track of completions difficult.
I don’t know whether your local council offers a similar thing, but I do know of other councils around the UK who do, so it may be worth checking with them if it’s something you are interested in.
Sussex Students’ Union
EduCare for Education provides an online training course. Each module is followed by a set of questions and students can only get to the next module after completing the previous one.
The good thing about this site is that you can check who completed the course and what percentage they got right.
Here's the link for more info:
http://www.educareforeducation.com/
Oxford Hub
We ask students to do an online child protection course, offered through the local safeguarding children board. We liaise directly with the council lead on Child Safeguarding, and work with him to ensure that all our processes and procedures are adequate. We have recently discussed with him the need to develop two different levels of child safeguarding training – one on basic safeguarding awareness for all volunteers and a more advanced course for project coordinators, focussing particularly on whistleblowing and supervision of other volunteers. We are working with him to develop this training and will pay for it be delivered to our project coordinators.
Where can we find up to date stats and info about the benefits of student volunteering?
There are various reports and studies which detail the impact of student volunteering and the positive benefits for students in terms of skills and employability:
http://www.nus.org.uk/Global/CBI_NUS_Employability%20report_May%202011.pdf
http://vinspired.com/uploads/admin_assets/datas/4/original/attitudes_and_perceptions.pdf
There are similar findings here: http://vinspired.org/resources/9
http://www.publicengagement.ac.uk/about/vinspired-students/about-our-project/research/bursting-bubble
Duke of Edinburgh Awards – How do different unis work with them?
‘We don’t actually run D of E here but I do have a local contact who supervises the Gold Award and he usually comes to our Volunteering Fair to recruit directly (presumably looking for those that completed Silver whilst at school).’
‘Some time ago our VC asked me to look at setting something up here. Various meetings ensued with a local College who run a D of E scheme (to see how it was set up there) then with our Pro-V-C and various staff members. The upshot was everyone seemed keen but no-one wanted ownership. It ended up falling to me to set up but it’s not wholly my remit. Also, it would have needed office space, resources and a dedicated member of staff to administer. I did a quick survey of students who would be interested in taking up the scheme and there was good feedback. Also, some staff members who could volunteer as expedition supervisors etc. Overall, it was clearly a job in itself to co-ordinate / administrate and would require a paid member of staff.’
‘As a University and Students’ Union we have decided not to take on the Duke of Edinburgh offer this year. Despite it being a well known and accredited programme with plenty of support, the want from our students appears quite low at this point to take on the registration fee and cost of another member of staff solely for Duke of Edinburgh.
The main reasons are:
·The Duke of Edinburgh awards are only open to those under 25 (which doesn’t cover our mature student population who are very active at our Students’ Union).
·Each award takes almost two University years to complete (as many students use their summer months for holidays/ work- they also noted that the staff member would not work the summer period so any students with questions over summer would not be able to get a response)- The Gold Award if you haven’t done any awards previously has a breakdown of 12 months, 12 months and 18 months for the three skills.
·From speaking to others supporting the award at their University of FE College, those students that take on the DofE have previously done awards or looking to finish off their awards.
·The cost to the student (joining an exercise club/society or activity class, the cost of the expedition, potential cost of the skill, the residential at Gold as well as living costs as a student) seems to be fairly large for the average student.
Therefore at this point we are unable to take on the Duke of Edinburgh award but we will certainly direct any students interested to their nearest Duke of Edinburgh centre, if anyone does take on the offer that is currently on the table please let us know how you get on as we would be interested to look over anything in future if this proves successful.’
What’s the best way to track external volunteering activities?
‘This year we introduced a new application process to track statistics.
We advertise on behalf of external charities on our website, however, when a student applies the initial application comes directly to us, we then forward the student an application form (if the organisation has one) or we send it directly to the organisation.
Following this we add them onto our database with a reminder date set for a week later; we follow it up with a quick phone call to see how they have got on. I know this is an additional administrative step, but once we developed a routine it has its benefits! In addition to recording volunteering hours, we can record specific statistics and also develop a personalised relationship with our student volunteers and organisations.’
‘When I started my current role I had the same tracking problem. I worked with our IT team to develop an interactive database of opportunities that tracks involvement. It now also has an hours logging/impact functionality that you can use to generate certificates. It’s now available for sale as Stripe XVS through an external company (Stripe Solutions). Sadly I do not get a commission!!
Organisations have to log in to post adverts and also to collect the details of students who have applied. They reply to them through the system so you have a record of that initial contact. Organisations that leave people waiting too long for replies or don’t get back to our students at all get blacklisted (a rather dramatic term for the rather polite but stern email I send them!)
It also has push button report functionality which is handy when the funders are demanding up to date stats.’
Staffordshire University Students Union
If you’re looking at barriers to volunteering, having a critical eye on your service using Gaskin’s eight pressure points may be a useful exercise (particularly with a focus group!) It isn’t wholly accurate for SU volunteering as we cover so much, but very useful to know and adapt for yourselves.
The eight pressure points are:
- Image and appeal of volunteering
- Methods of recruiting volunteers
- Recruitment and application process
- Induction into volunteering
- Training for volunteers
- Overall management
- Ethos and culture of organisation
- Support and supervision
The idea being if a volunteer feels these eight points are done well, then they will have confidence in the service and the idea of volunteering and theoretically be a long term volunteer! More info can be found on the report: A Choice Blend, by Gaskin
IVR
The report Exploring Impacts of Volunteering on University Students in London offers some insight
UELSU
Use this survey
What is the status of RAG (society, programme, etc) and how is it administered?
University of Derby Students' Union
At Derby we separated RAG off as a Standing Committee (along with d:one our radio station and dusted our magazine) two years ago and as Societies and Activities Coordinator I oversee the support of RAG. Generally it works quite well for us as our RAG was small and we are still building the culture up of RAG. It allows us to give them more guidance/support and as we recruit the committee through an interview process we are more able to ensure it is led by the best people for the job. You can find the committee recruitment handbook here.
Staffordshire University Students' Union
Our RAG is now written in to our constitution so even though they exist as a society (like our student media groups, also written into our constitution) we support them as a society but try to encourage them to be the ideas people. They function as a society but use a lot of the resources of the volunteer scheme and work closely with us for support as they are very small at the moment.
Hull University Union
We have RAG as a standing committee at Hull. It sits in the Community Zone and is supported by the VP Community sabb and the Student Activities Co-ordinator. All money raised by students, whether societies, teams, RAG committee etc. is paid in and donated through the RAG account so we can keep track of how much money has been raised by students at the university. The Chair RAG is voted in as part of the student officer elections in February. I don’t know if it’s the case with you, but here all societies are required to charge a joining fee to members so for us it wouldn’t be fair to require people to pay out in order to raise money.
What models or methods of monitoring and evaluation do you use for student-led projects?
NCCPE
Have written a guide to Student-Led Project Evaluation.
NUS
Is working with NEF (new Economics Foundation) on a wider piece of work around impact of students’ union, and one of the elements they’re designing is a way that students’ union can assess their impact in the community.
The research objectives are:
· To develop a research methodology and framework that allows SUs to measure and demonstrate impact;
· Build capacity within NUS and SUs so that they can use and roll out this methodology without relying on outside consultants in the longer term;
· Provide an analysis of the data on outcomes from this research with particular reference to how this data can be used to ensure sustainability, improve financial stability, enhance reputation and communicate the public benefit of SUs.
The first element of the framework should be ready by the start of the 2013-14 academic year.
Bristol
Work with students to develop custom monitoring and evaluation toolkits for each project, which students fill in and submit to staff on a monthly basis. The information collected is used to help with funding bids and to measure community impact. The evaluations are based are Children in Need evaluation tools. Two sample toolkits can be found here.
Manchester
Use the Social Return on Investment Model. They also make use of NCVO resources, including the Impacts Pyramid.
UELSU
Asks all students who receive SU funding to fill in a form in relation to their project's impact , which can be found here.
They also require that students design and complete their own monitoring and evaluation system, whcih is generally a combination of budget sheets, a feedback form for clients and volunteers, and some more creative methods (eg: getting young children to make drawings about their favourite parts or creating before and after photo montages). This is supported by training in budget management and monitoring and evaluation.
With regard to budgets, students bank through the SU but must update their own budgets. They create their budget sheets from a template at the first training session. All the budgets are kept online so that the SU can check on them or pass them on to new students if the ones in charge suddenly disappear.
In terms of monitoring and evaluation, we ask that all forms and results are either stored on our surveymonkey account, or on Google Drive and shared with us. In this way we can see results as they come in. For all other feedback the coordinators seek out or receive, we ask that they document it and send it along with their periodic reports.
What social networking do universities use to support student volunteering?
The University of Manchester
Use Facebook and Twitter as a way of informing students of latest opportunities and events that may be of interest to them. They have the two linked so that by updating Twitter (@mlpvolunteering) Facebook is automatically updated. Having experimented with different ways what they have found works best is to have a fan page set up. They currently have over 500 students, who have joined it. Staff don't use their personal accounts.
Leeds Metropolitan University
Use Facebook and various blog sites. They have a Facebook fan page and also each group of volunteers set up a group page - this is sometimes a much better way to keep in touch than email! They moderate people's comments on the FB fan page from time to time just in case. Generally they‘ve found Twitter to be too much effort but the library and SU use it and have a live feed into the student portal. They also use blogs. Click here for an example. They're really useful for volunteers, who go overseas but for some projects they‘ve had to slightly edit references to things that didn't seem appropriate like volunteering with terrible hangovers! Also they have a Health and Safety team, who have sometimes picked up on issues that they've noticed in photos! This isn't really social networking but meetomatic is brilliant for organising dates for meetings with the students. It’s similar to doodle.
Student Hubs
Click here for their brilliant guide to Twitter. Bear in mind, only last week Twitter have released a new version (#newtwitter) so this is slightly out of date.
University of Dundee
Use social networking for the university's peer welcoming, buddying and mentoring scheme - Peer Connections – (group and page). They give guidance to volunteers, who are connected to fellow students to do not add them as friends but instead get them to join the group page and keep in touch that way. This is less risky from the point of view of the volunteer as they are not then in a situation of disclosing personal info to people they hardly know and maintains an appropriate boundary. If volunteers want to use it between them that is a personal decision.
London Metropolitan University
Use both Facebook and Twitter. In Facebook they started with a group. When pages were introduced, they tried to “migrate” and bring all the group members to become fans of the page. Now, they mostly use the page, which gets updated from Twitter using TweetDeck (more info on TweetDeck in the Student Hubs Twitter guide above). Click here for a small document summarising the purpose and use of Facebook & Twitter and how they could be applied to the university’s Department of Student Services. The university’s Faculty of Computing also uses Second Life. They have an island and provide some useful information for prospective and current students. The volunteering team are considering ways of engaging with Second Life but they’ve only just started on it.
University of Cumbria Students' Union
See their Facebook group here.
What level of child protection training do you offer to volunteers and how do you offer it?
Lancaster University Student’s Union
Safeguarding professional from Lancashire County Council delivers training to staff members each year. From this, we then devise our own training to deliver to all 700 students that volunteer with children and young people (and vulnerable adults where necessary). This training is also agreed to by the head teachers/DSPs of the local schools that we work with.
You can find a copy of the slides we use for this training, along with our Safeguarding Policy, on our website. Please note though that these slides are only used as a visual aid to content we deliver, rather than covering everything (for example, there are a lot of ‘dilemmas’ and scenarios missing from those slides).
Student Community Action, Durham University
We provide a Level 1 Online Child Safeguarding course to all of our volunteers who are working with children. We access this through the local council, who offer the course to all voluntary groups in the area.
Pro: The course was already established so it requires very little work on our behalf.
Con: We don’t administer the sign ups ourselves, we have to email them to the course administrator in the council, which does make keeping track of completions difficult.
I don’t know whether your local council offers a similar thing, but I do know of other councils around the UK who do, so it may be worth checking with them if it’s something you are interested in.
Sussex Students’ Union
EduCare for Education provides an online training course. Each module is followed by a set of questions and students can only get to the next module after completing the previous one.
The good thing about this site is that you can check who completed the course and what percentage they got right.
Here's the link for more info:
http://www.educareforeducation.com/
Oxford Hub
We ask students to do an online child protection course, offered through the local safeguarding children board. We liaise directly with the council lead on Child Safeguarding, and work with him to ensure that all our processes and procedures are adequate. We have recently discussed with him the need to develop two different levels of child safeguarding training – one on basic safeguarding awareness for all volunteers and a more advanced course for project coordinators, focussing particularly on whistleblowing and supervision of other volunteers. We are working with him to develop this training and will pay for it be delivered to our project coordinators.
Where can we find up to date stats and info about the benefits of student volunteering?
There are various reports and studies which detail the impact of student volunteering and the positive benefits for students in terms of skills and employability:
http://www.nus.org.uk/Global/CBI_NUS_Employability%20report_May%202011.pdf
http://vinspired.com/uploads/admin_assets/datas/4/original/attitudes_and_perceptions.pdf
There are similar findings here: http://vinspired.org/resources/9
http://www.publicengagement.ac.uk/about/vinspired-students/about-our-project/research/bursting-bubble
Duke of Edinburgh Awards – How do different unis work with them?
‘We don’t actually run D of E here but I do have a local contact who supervises the Gold Award and he usually comes to our Volunteering Fair to recruit directly (presumably looking for those that completed Silver whilst at school).’
‘Some time ago our VC asked me to look at setting something up here. Various meetings ensued with a local College who run a D of E scheme (to see how it was set up there) then with our Pro-V-C and various staff members. The upshot was everyone seemed keen but no-one wanted ownership. It ended up falling to me to set up but it’s not wholly my remit. Also, it would have needed office space, resources and a dedicated member of staff to administer. I did a quick survey of students who would be interested in taking up the scheme and there was good feedback. Also, some staff members who could volunteer as expedition supervisors etc. Overall, it was clearly a job in itself to co-ordinate / administrate and would require a paid member of staff.’
‘As a University and Students’ Union we have decided not to take on the Duke of Edinburgh offer this year. Despite it being a well known and accredited programme with plenty of support, the want from our students appears quite low at this point to take on the registration fee and cost of another member of staff solely for Duke of Edinburgh.
The main reasons are:
·The Duke of Edinburgh awards are only open to those under 25 (which doesn’t cover our mature student population who are very active at our Students’ Union).
·Each award takes almost two University years to complete (as many students use their summer months for holidays/ work- they also noted that the staff member would not work the summer period so any students with questions over summer would not be able to get a response)- The Gold Award if you haven’t done any awards previously has a breakdown of 12 months, 12 months and 18 months for the three skills.
·From speaking to others supporting the award at their University of FE College, those students that take on the DofE have previously done awards or looking to finish off their awards.
·The cost to the student (joining an exercise club/society or activity class, the cost of the expedition, potential cost of the skill, the residential at Gold as well as living costs as a student) seems to be fairly large for the average student.
Therefore at this point we are unable to take on the Duke of Edinburgh award but we will certainly direct any students interested to their nearest Duke of Edinburgh centre, if anyone does take on the offer that is currently on the table please let us know how you get on as we would be interested to look over anything in future if this proves successful.’
What’s the best way to track external volunteering activities?
‘This year we introduced a new application process to track statistics.
We advertise on behalf of external charities on our website, however, when a student applies the initial application comes directly to us, we then forward the student an application form (if the organisation has one) or we send it directly to the organisation.
Following this we add them onto our database with a reminder date set for a week later; we follow it up with a quick phone call to see how they have got on. I know this is an additional administrative step, but once we developed a routine it has its benefits! In addition to recording volunteering hours, we can record specific statistics and also develop a personalised relationship with our student volunteers and organisations.’
‘When I started my current role I had the same tracking problem. I worked with our IT team to develop an interactive database of opportunities that tracks involvement. It now also has an hours logging/impact functionality that you can use to generate certificates. It’s now available for sale as Stripe XVS through an external company (Stripe Solutions). Sadly I do not get a commission!!
Organisations have to log in to post adverts and also to collect the details of students who have applied. They reply to them through the system so you have a record of that initial contact. Organisations that leave people waiting too long for replies or don’t get back to our students at all get blacklisted (a rather dramatic term for the rather polite but stern email I send them!)
It also has push button report functionality which is handy when the funders are demanding up to date stats.’