Volunteering

Aim

To have motivated, supported, and well-trained volunteers from all backgrounds. Our volunteers have seen a huge amount of change in Scouts in the last year, which they’ve taken in their stride.

We thank them for all they do, remembering it’s vital every volunteer has a wonderful experience at Scouts. We hope that if they enjoy volunteering with us, they’ll continue to support our young people as they gain skills for life.

We also want to welcome new volunteers. It’s only through growing our volunteers that we’ll be able to give more young people the chance to enjoy Scouts.

Since 2018, as part of our Skills for Life strategy, this was the ‘People’ section of the Annual Report. As we’ve progressed beyond the Skills for Life strategy, our focus on ‘People’ became our Volunteer Experience Programme. This section is now called ‘Volunteering’ to reflect this change.

Goals

• To recruit more volunteers to Scouts, welcoming them warmly from the start.
• To make sure volunteering is always a positive experience through our redesigned approach. This includes being more flexible, so volunteers can easily carry out their Scouts role(s) alongside their other life commitments.
• To create even more engaging learning for our volunteers, supporting them to develop their skills when and where they need them most.
• To provide the digital tools needed to enable these goals.

Progress a year on

• Local volunteers are adopting the changes we’ve made to make volunteering with Scouts easier and more attractive. Our local volunteers have been vital in powering this transformation. They’re embedding our new Volunteering Culture along with changes to local Trustee Boards. We’re thrilled that volunteers are embracing new ways to welcome new volunteers and organising themselves in a teams-based approach.
• In November 2024, we began the roll out of new digital tools, easily accessed through scouts.org.uk, that support our new ways of working. My Membership allows volunteers to manage all the processes they need in one place, including applying for adventurous activity permits, completing the Nights Away Notification process, onboarding new volunteers, and much more. Since it launched, nearly 77,000 volunteers have signed in, which is more than double the number that ever signed into our old membership system, Compass.
• While we’ve had a lot of success stories, and many are finding the new ways of working positive, there are more and ongoing challenges than we expected, which are particularly impacting our Lead Volunteers. This has meant putting more time, attention and resources into fixing bugs, refining and improving the digital tools, which’ll continue over the coming months.
• Redesigned with volunteers and subject matter experts, our new learning is easier to use and more intuitive. Crucially, all learning can be accessed online, at a time or place that suits our volunteers. Since this learning launched, over 72,000 volunteers have completed a new learning course, with 92% feeling they understood the topics covered in the course and 88% feeling it prepared them for their role.
• We’ve also redesigned the way we welcome new volunteers to Scouts, aided by our new digital tools, which were designed in collaboration with Girlguiding and generously funded by the Pears Foundation. We’re already seeing volunteers using these tools to advertise roles locally and onboard new volunteers.
• To help with the nationwide roll out of these changes, our local Transformation Leads have given vital support across all 85 Counties, Areas and Scottish Regions in the UK. In their local patches, Transformation Leads have communicated upcoming changes, engaging with volunteers and dealing with concerns.
• When our digital tools went live, over 800 volunteers worked in our ‘Go Live Support Teams’, helping to answer local questions and queries.
• Our website now has a wider range of resources, including mini training videos.
• The National Support Team continues to provide advice and problem solving for volunteers as they start to use the new digital tools. We’re also supporting volunteers’ digital skills through our award-winning Digital Skills platform, which was kindly funded by Nominet and CAST. This tool, aided by our Digital Champions, helps volunteers to build their skills and confidence.
• We’ve improved our support, web guidance, and readiness information to help everyone understand and prepare for the changes coming locally.

What's next

• We’ll continue working with our local volunteers, making sure our new ways of working and digital tools are supporting people effectively, and everyone is fully supported in adopting these changes.
• We’ll keep acting on user feedback to improve the digital tools, resources and information for volunteers.
• We’ll continue developing new resources and launch more voluntary learning, including our new Wood Badge as part of ‘Branching Out’ learning. ‘Branching Out’ will be the additional optional learning our volunteers can complete to improve their skills in different areas. This is currently made up of learning to support growing your Section, delivering residential experiences, improving practical skills and more. In the future, we’ll review this content and launch more across a variety of different topics.
• As ever, we’re always looking at areas of our volunteer experience that we’d like to improve.