Let's Transform Volunteering with Data.

Investing in building a data culture, enabling data sharing and fostering innovation could transform volunteering.

We convened senior stakeholders from volunteer-involving organisations and industry bodies, data and technology leaders, academia, and, importantly, volunteers to explore how a modern, open, data infrastructure could be used to improve the volunteer experience.

Volunteering plays a crucial role in society, delivering essential services for communities, contributing to the economy, and developing skills for people. However, the current volunteering system is fragmented, with data silos limiting access to opportunities and hindering collaboration. In partnership with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), we explored how a modern, open data infrastructure could enhance the volunteer experience. By improving data interoperability, using AI, and increasing digital literacy, organisations can streamline volunteer recruitment, personalise experiences, and foster greater engagement.

To unlock these benefits, three priority areas must be addressed: embracing innovation, enabling data sharing, and building a data culture. If you are interested in building new collaborations to do more research or want to develop proofs of concept that prove the value of volunteer data infrastructure, we want to hear from you. Read the article and find out more.

Introduction

Volunteers play a critical role in society, delivering essential services to our communities, providing support in emergencies, educating young people, fundraising for charities, providing support to vulnerable people, offering spiritual opportunities and much more. Through these experiences, volunteers developed their own skills, improved their well-being, and were estimated to contribute £26 billion a year to the economy.

The volunteering system is diverse and complex. It encompasses volunteers, the organisations they support, and the organisations who work to make volunteering work. There are many ways to volunteer, for example taking a formal role with an established charity, or more informal volunteering such as self-organising and taking social action. There are a wide range of volunteer-involving organisations including large multi-national charities, movements like Scouts or parkrun, medical charities, associations and sports clubs, ‘pop-up’ volunteer groups with shared interests and many more. The system also includes a range of national and international organisations and campaigns that work to improve and increase volunteering.

Despite this diversity, the volunteering system has a common aim - to drive an increase in volunteer hours and the social, environmental and economic impact of these hours by: empowering volunteers, building a diversity of volunteers and volunteering opportunities, improving the volunteer experience, and enabling collaboration and innovation.

We’ve been working with The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to explore the hypothesis that a modern, open, data infrastructure could be used to improve the volunteer experience, making it easier for volunteers to find opportunities, supporting the growth of volunteering and increasing its impact.

The state of volunteering data infrastructure

Digital services provide new methods to attract, recruit and manage volunteers. Modern analytical methods provide new ways to understand volunteers and volunteering. Technology innovation, including advancements in AI, presents hugeopportunities for the volunteering system.

It’s essential that we continue to explore the barriers to adopting AI and support small charities with the tools and skills they need to implement AI effectively and safely. AI has the potential to transform organisations, particularly those facing significant resource pressures and rising demand for services. - National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO)

To take advantage of digital and AI innovations, organisations require access to a modern, open, data infrastructure that includes: datasets; the technology, training and processes that make them useable; policies and regulations such as those for data sharing and protection; and the organisations and people that collect, maintain and use data. Previous DCMS research identified that the digital volunteering marketplace is fragmented, with limited data interoperability between tools. There are also concerns around levels of data skill and concerns around inclusion.

Fragmented and siloed data

There is a lot of volunteering data. However, data is currently fragmented and siloed, inconsistent and of variable quality, and data capabilities are limited. Whilst these challenges are not unique to the volunteering system, the volunteering system tends to have a lower capacity to invest in transformation and innovation.

Volunteer-involving organisations use a wide range of volunteer management and other digital systems, which are usually built to proprietary requirements and specifications. Whilst systems deliver the capabilities these organisations need, data is often siloed within them.

These data silos make it difficult for both volunteers looking to find opportunities and for volunteer-involving organisations looking to market the opportunities they have. The disconnected nature of these systems also leads to challenges in connecting local volunteering infrastructure with national infrastructure, and in developing partnerships across the volunteering system.

Some organisations are promoting open data-based solutions to these challenges. Research from Team Kinetic into the response to the COVID-19 pandemic emphasises the importance of improving interoperability between systems.

“Interoperability will depend on a well-structured and well-documented, publicly available API; this is required for all the involved Volunteer Management Systems so they can talk to each other. Creating and maintaining a good quality API is a non-trivial technical task.”

More recently, in October 2024, George Grima, Co-founder and CEO at Doit published an article outlining the need to ‘build the digital rails for civil society’. In the article, he references work that Doit is undertaking to develop ‘Open Volunteering’.

‘We’re working towards developing open data standards that will make it easy for a charity to publish once to any volunteering platform, management system or advertising board and have their advertisement populated across the UK’s many tools. This will let charities, campaigns and communities have their own dedicated and custom platforms whilst still getting their opportunities in front of the public.’

Data skills

Digital skills in the charity sector are maturing. The Charity Digital Skills Report 2024 states that ‘90% of charities rate themselves as fair to excellent at basic digital skills.’ The same report highlights that ‘Growing staff/volunteer digital skills is a priority for 46% of charities.’.

However, data skills and maturity continue to be an area of concern for volunteer-led organisations. There is a clear gap between larger and smaller charities, and there are also variations between sectors. Data Orchard’s latest report on data maturity in the nonprofit sector emphasises that “Skills remains the worst scoring theme for all sectors and hasn’t shifted in the last four years. Most organisations don’t have the right skills, capabilities and resources to maximise the use of their data, and many do not know what they need. Data literacy is a challenge for over 75% of organisations.”

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