Creating a volunteer role

Before you start your volunteer recruitment, think about why you are recruiting volunteers and how you can offer them a good experience.

• Reflect on your organisation’s goals and objectives. How will your volunteers support these?
• Think about what skills and experience you want your volunteers to have. You can carry out a skills audit of your existing team to help identify any skills gaps.
• Think about your target audience and their motivations. People have different reasons for volunteering, such as wanting to ‘give back’, learning new skills or socialising.
• Consider what new volunteer roles will contribute to the work of your organisation. Volunteers are not substitutes for paid staff. They should be given distinct opportunities to create impact using their unique skills and experience.
• Think about any barriers which might make it harder for new volunteers to find your opportunity and apply. Do you need to provide information about your volunteering role in more than one language or format, for example?
• Offer flexibility around timings and location for volunteers to choose from. Must a role be done in-person? Instead, could it be performed remotely? Or a mix of both?
• Plan what resources you’ll need for your volunteers and volunteer managers. Consider how much time and money you can allocate to supervision and training.
• Plan how you'll support your volunteers’ wellbeing. Many volunteering roles can be emotionally demanding.
• If you involve people with lived experience as volunteers, make sure you consider the support they may need and how you will provide this.

Use our planning for volunteers guidance to help you prepare.

Think about how you can create or adapt a role so it’s accessible to people with different backgrounds, skills, experiences and abilities. There are many toolkits available online that can help you with this.

• Neath Port Talbot CVS has a toolkit to help you diversify your volunteers (pdf, 680KB). This includes guidance on welcoming volunteers who are:
  • from the LGBTQ+ community
  • from global majority backgrounds
  • asylum seekers or refugees
  • carers.
• Sheffield Volunteer Centre provides guidance on involving refugees and asylum seeker volunteers.
• Mencap has a disability inclusion toolkit (pdf, 2.7MB) with helpful checklists and action plans.
• You can also use these guidelines to reduce and remove digital barriers for disabled volunteers (PDF, 510KB).
• The Centre for Ageing Better has information on engaging older volunteers.
• The National Lottery Community Fund has a toolkit for recruiting volunteers with criminal convictions.
• You can learn more about family friendly volunteering in our research report: Families and volunteering: An evidence-based framework for volunteer-involving organisations, 2020.

You can learn more about inclusive volunteering from:

• our guidance on equity, diversity and inclusion in volunteering
• our latest Time Well Spent research reports.

Write a description for each role you are recruiting for.

Your description should explain what tasks are involved, the types of skills and experience required and what support you will offer.

For help drafting your descriptions, use our writing volunteer role descriptions guidance.