Understanding the target population

A sound understanding and appreciation of the target population is

essential for any targeting campaign. Direct links with the local community are key ways to gather essential information, such as barriers to volunteering. It can also help you gain further entry points into the community.


Below are a few examples of how other organisations have accoplished this:


Worcester Volunteer centre have specialist outreach workers to target volunteers.
Richmond CVS work with other organisations in thier local area.


Home-Start Leeds have also built relationships with local service providers.

Worcester volunteer centre has appointed a specialist outreach worker with particular promotional skills and knowledge of target communities. Among other things, the appointment helps:

Identification of promotional venues such as youth clubs. Pubs, community centres, libraries and doctors surgeries
Ensure that others such as community workers, youth workers and health professionals have information to give potential volunteers
Focus on black and minority ethnic (BME) communities in relation to volunteering.

Women in Governance, (WinG) is managed my Richmond CVS (council for voluntary services). It encourages and supports women to take part in local community.

Reaching potential volunteers is identified as a critical challenge for WinG. In order to ensure that this challenge is met, the project has built an effective network of local partnership arrangements with BME, refugee, disability carer and lone parent support organisations to enable a grassroots recruitment campaign to be implemented. The project delivers a number of outreach events through these organisations.

In order to ensure successful recruitment of women and particularly from black and minority ethnic groups WinG recognises the importance of constantly nurturing contacts with the local voluntary sector, business, contacts within organisations such as local authorities and the volunteers themselves.

The project also attracts people with not qualifications as it has approved learning provider status from the Open College Network, and policies to support learners from all backgrounds. It also tackles tackles language barriers for those from BME and refugee communities through the use of volunteer translators

The project concentrates on developing relations with organisations that deal with people from socially deprived backgrounds, but also stresses that anyone can volunteer with them, including those from well educated backgrounds.

Home-Start Leeds support parents of young children to provide their kids the best start in life.

Six years ago Home-Start Leeds identified the need to diversify, they identified that there were a lot of people who traditionally never thought about volunteering, but also recognised that simple advertising would not grab the attention of these ‘hard to reach’ potential volunteers.

Home-Start therefore asked “what are the barriers to these people volunteering”

They identified that their target groups were engaged with other services, and so set about creating links with these organisations, to highlight the benefits of volunteering to staff and their clients. Home-Start have now developed structured contacts with different service providers in Leeds, including housing offices, social services, the benefits agency and job centres in order to encourage volunteer referrals.

Home-Start also examined their own practices asking “what do we do that stop people volunteering?” And started eliminating procedures and processes that could act as a barrier. This practice is now embedded within Home-Starts culture.

“It makes you think about people in a different way. Don’t make assumptions about people, but start from an absolutely blank sheet.”