Time Well Spent: A national survey on the volunteer experience

Section 3 describes the levels of volunteering through a group, club or organisation, both recently (over the last 12 months) and over people’s lifetimes. It also explores who does and does not volunteer by key demographic groups.

Section 4 looks at the context of volunteering, focusing on recent volunteers’ main volunteering experience: what volunteers do, when and how they give their time, who they give time to and how they get started, including their motivations.

Section 5 explores in detail the experience of recent volunteers across the volunteer journey, focusing on their main organisation. It looks at how their experience varies by different types of volunteers and volunteering, and whether and how volunteers’ experiences are meeting their needs and expectations.

Section 6 looks at the volunteers’ perceptions about the impacts of volunteering, including the benefits they feel they get out of taking part and any negative experiences they have had. These findings focus on recent volunteers.

Section 7 looks at how likely recent volunteers are to continue volunteering with their main organisation over the next year and their reasons for continuing or not. It also explores the experience of lapsed volunteers and the reasons they stopped volunteering. Finally, it draws together the factors most strongly associated with volunteer retention.

Section 8 looks to the future, focusing on those who have not volunteered recently, and explores what stops people from volunteering and what might encourage them to get involved in the future. It then looks at levels of interest in a number of future volunteering opportunities, among both volunteers and non-volunteers.

Section 9 summarises some of our key learnings from across the research. It identifies a number of areas for organisations to think about if they want to support people in having a quality volunteer experience. It also looks at what the findings might mean for policy, in the context of current societal trends