About GoldStar 
Appropriate management information
and records of volunteers
Volunteer organisation should have sound management systems in place. They should generate management information and have a commitment to keeping good personnel records so that they run as effectively and efficiently as possible.
Below are a few examples of how other organisations have accoplished this: |
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BUCFP ensures that its aims are being achieved through monitoring and evaluation activities. |
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121 Youth Befriending has set up a computerised case management system that all coordinators can access and feed into. |
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Bolton Lads and Girls club has developed a bespoke computerised system for maintaining records of volunteers |
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Manchester Event Volunteers maintains a database of over 2,500 enthusiastic volunteers so that they can access MEV’s website. |
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Brighton Unemployed Centre Families Project
Brighton Unemployed Centre Families Project, (BUCFP), is run by a team of trained volunteers supported by a part-time paid worker. The aim of the Project is relieve poverty, distress, and hardship among unemployed, poorly housed, and low-waged people and their families.
BUCFP has sought to ensure that its aims were being achieved through monitoring and evaluation activities. Wide-ranging methods of evaluation have been employed by Brighton Unemployed Centre Families Project to aid future planning and thus improve the quality of services including:
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Project worker’s report
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Course feedback
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Specific evaluation reports on individual projects e.g. creative writing project
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Suggestions box
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Annual user survey
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Anecdotal evidence
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Development plan review
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Individual case studies
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User participation in projects and other associated statistics
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Complaints
Furthermore collaboration with the University of Brighton will expand the work on evaluation to include:
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Tracking
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Focus groups
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Producing a report to evidence success criteria on recruitment and retention of volunteers
121 Youth Befriending
121 Youth Befriending has set up a computerised case management system that all coordinators can access and feed into. This provides an effective way for central monitoring, as well as greater accountability and accessibility. The system includes:
Client name, contact details and date of birth
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Entry date |
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Client status |
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Referral reasons and comments |
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Further notes on referral details and notes on client |
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Details of agencies involved in referral |
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Outcome after participation in project |
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CRB check and personal reference details |
The management system can generate a range of standard reports, including:
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Referral by:
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Ethnic group
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Gender
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Client Group
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Agency (Named advocat)
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Cases by referral reason
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Time spent on activities by client group/referral group
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Outcomes
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Client location
Other uses of ICT include using the website to begin the recruitment process for volunteers online, and the production of promotional DVDs.
121 Youth Befriending has a bespoke website with information relating to the Zero Project in four languages, other than English, these being Bengali, Punjabi, Urdu and Chinese.
Age Concern Gateshead
The Project brings a strategic approach to volunteering throughout the organisation, building on the volunteer related practices that have been developed and improved over the years, and to enhance the support and supervision of the volunteers. The project has also begun to embrace the use of ICT in its work. This is exemplified by the use of IT to analyse the profile of the volunteer body in order to assess its diversity. The Project is also developing IT systems to record volunteer data in order to improve quality and timeliness in the generation of management information.
The database is being used to identify long serving volunteers and provides the Project with information regarding diversity and educational qualifications. Such information can be useful in providing supporting evidence for funding applications. The database helps in providing up-to-date statistics for report writing. Ian Hutchinson, the Volunteer Co-ordinator at Gateshead Age Concern commented:
“Our database is fairly recent and we are now trying to analyse more and collect data. But based on what we have so far I would say that up to 60% of volunteers are coming in on word of mouth”
Bolton Lads and Girls Club
Comprehensive records of volunteers are maintained through a database recording and management information system. This is a bespoke development based on a Microsoft Access platform.
The database system records all the information relating to the volunteer mentors. This includes personal information about all volunteers including when CRB checks are undertaken, reference checks, interviews and source of enquiry. The database then records all elements of each individual’s induction and training package and highlights sessions that the volunteers may have missed for whatever reason. As a volunteer mentor is matched with a young person this information is recorded on the database together with every meeting date the mentor has with their assigned young person. Every contact Bolton Lads and Girls Club have with the mentor is recorded, together with a brief overview of the conversation.
Bolton and Lads Girls Club can view at a glance all contact made with the mentor, how often they are meeting their mentee, what training they require and when their supervisions have occurred and are next due. The Project has demonstrated this database system to other mentoring providers, who have visited the project and they have been impressed with the high level of information, statistics and records kept. The database can then analyse information relating to the recruitment of volunteers, the numbers of mentors meeting their mentees in any particular week, how often a mentor attends training, any further information that may be required by the operational team, the Project Manager, the Club’s Board of Directors or the external funding organisations. The Project is also asked to provide in-depth information relating to the mentoring relationships to professional agencies such as social services and this system allows the Project to do this efficiently and accurately. Some of the information is used to measure how effective the Project’s recruitment campaigns are, the retention rates of the volunteer workforce, the ethnicity and make up of the volunteers, attendance at the weekly training workshops and any information that may be outstanding for example a reference or a supervision meeting.
Karen Edwards, the Mentoring Project Manager at Bolton Lads and Girls Club, underlined the importance of the database to the operation of the mentoring project:
“It’s an Access database system that our project administrator has developed and created and it is the backbone to everything we do”
“When you think about the type of young people we are working with that have been referred maybe from a child protection committee or from the Youth offending team these are very vulnerable young people and we would expect nothing less than to be able to get hold of our mentors who are working one to one with them, touch base with them, find out how the meeting went, provide some support over the telephone and then be able to liaise back with the social worker or the teacher or whoever about how the relationship is going. All that information is input directly onto the database. Every contact we have we can view at the touch of a button to look at the whole relationship of how that young person and mentor have worked together”.
Manchester Event Volunteers
MEV maintains a database of over 2,500 enthusiastic volunteers who continue to support a wide range of community, national and international cultural and sporting events.
On receipt of an application form, the individual is registered onto the MEV database after which they then have access to information on the MEV website. They also elect to receive a monthly newsletter by post or via e-mail, which highlights current volunteering activities and opportunities. All documentation is available in printed format as well as electronically to ensure that those without access to a computer are not disadvantaged.
Records of the volunteers and mentors are maintained through management of the database. Full details are recorded including all data from the application form, training records and records of each event volunteers have expressed an interest in and those they have subsequently attended. This ensures that accurate reports on all aspects of volunteer/mentor activity and feedback can be produced quickly. MEV maintains all records in line with the Data Protection Act.
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