Investing in Volunteers

We benefit from the energy and commitment of an engaged and active volunteer community of 2,500 members. Spread across the UK and Ireland, our volunteer communities provide significant value to RTPI membership through a variety of undertakings. These range from Planning Aid England to local social networking events; Awards judging to professional mentoring; and official representation of the RTPI to delivery of CPD training. It is a broad and enviable tapestry of invaluable support for our members but internally, across our operational areas our approach to recruiting, managing and retaining our volunteers has been ad-hoc and reactive, responsive to specific regional priorities or particular national circumstance rather than proactive, planned and interconnected across our service areas.

Maintaining our regional and national networks is important and we want to build on their unique circumstances and spirit of community. By creating a shared and inspiring vision of volunteering across the RTPI we will embed a pro-volunteering culture whereby members, staff and volunteers alike appreciate the value and positive impact of volunteering.

Volunteering is more than a means to an end: volunteers are part of the lifeblood of the Institute, influencing and underpinning the Institute’s vision, aims and plans and providing a vital delivery mechanism for adding value to membership services. Whilst our organisational decision-making and delivery structures must be maintained, we recognise that governance can sometimes limit creativity and influence culture – rigidity, bureaucracy and inefficiency make it difficult to implement change and to engage constructively with large numbers of volunteers – so our culture must be based on trust and mutual respect and underpinned by training and communications which reinforce an environment of collaboration and cooperation. We will foster a culture where staff proactively seek our volunteers’ input; and we will ensure our volunteers recognise and adhere to the parameters of their role, knowing that they will have opportunities to contribute ideas and opinions which will be welcomed and considered as part of our business planning processes.

We will preserve a culture of equality, team work, shared values and respect for standards, behaviour and performance. We will ensure everyone’s contribution is valued and celebrated together. Volunteer leadership and management will be recognised as professional skills and staff working alongside volunteers, will receive training to understand why our members volunteer and how to get the best out of relationships. Our volunteers’ induction will establish a culture where colleagues’ expectations are managed, and new volunteers are quickly integrated.

Our shared vision for volunteering will also allow us to create a platform for developing volunteering opportunities that highly relevant, easily accessible, add value to the membership, are of benefit to the individual, enhance the performance and reputation of the RTPI, and are easily replicable across our regional and national networks.

We will achieve this objective by:

• Developing and sharing valued understanding of the critical contribution of volunteers.
• Clarifying the roles and responsibilities of staff [in relation to volunteering] and volunteers across the Institute, ensuring they are appropriate and attractive to existing, new and potential volunteers and support the needs of the Institute, the expectations of the membership, and the aspirations of individual volunteers.
• Defining a shared understanding amongst staff and volunteers of the Institute as a “member-focused” organisation.
• Realising best practice in volunteering by adopting Investors in Volunteering principles; building on current good practice and implementing change where improvement is needed.
• Building on and developing our existing regional and national volunteer networks to encourage other people to get involved in RTPI volunteering.
• Ensuring all volunteer activities add value to the RTPI’s core member proposition.

Across the membership sector, in recent years there have been many changes in how volunteering is perceived, valued and accessed. Technology has enabled people to participate in online opportunities there has been a shift towards volunteers wanting more independence in their volunteering and increasingly expecting immediacy, choice and flexibility in the way that they participate. We need to continue to evolve and adapt our volunteer offer so that it responds to our members’ professional and personal commitments and also adds value to them and their communities. We also however need to ensure our offer adds value to the Institute and to our wider membership, and so a diversity of relevant volunteering opportunities is central to recruiting and retaining volunteers and to managing volunteer, member and staff expectations.

We recognise that some of our roles involve a heavy time commitment, particularly those sitting on the Board of Trustees, Committees and Panels and those which are centred around events, training provision or the public services of Planning Aid England, and so we should focus on additional ways for people to support us, which are accessible, innovative and flexible. If we are to grow our volunteer offer, we need to also ensure we have the systems in place to promote our opportunities and attract and retain the right people to the right roles. This means not just encouraging new people to volunteer with us, but also ensuring our current volunteers are able to supplement and develop their existing involvement, as well as make full use of their skills.

It is also important that our opportunities are accessible and attractive to a diverse range of volunteers from a variety of backgrounds, and to our Young Planners who represent our future pipeline of volunteers. This will ensure that our volunteers reflect the membership and the communities in which we work and that when required we can access a wide range of skills, experience and expertise. By focusing on developing our opportunities, we will ensure that our volunteer roles continue to inspire members to support us and achieve our wider organisational objectives.

We will achieve this objective by:

• Clearly understanding our volunteers’ motivations for volunteering, including what they want to get out of volunteering, how they want to support RTPI’s objectives, their time commitment preferences, the skills they have to share, and how they want to volunteer. This will build upon the survey of volunteers we undertook to inform this strategy.
• Attracting volunteers who have not previously considered volunteering for the Institute; providing a variety of opportunities which fulfil volunteers’ motivations.
• Developing new models of volunteering which are flexible to meet the time and commitment volunteers can offer.
• Embedding volunteering across the Institute so that volunteers are involved in supporting our work and the contribution of volunteers is identified and supported through team business plans.
• Developing and leveraging internal and external channels for recruiting volunteers, i.e. promoting volunteering as a benefit of membership as part of our wider member recruitment and retention strategies.

Until recently, volunteering for the RTPI had grown organically, meeting the needs of specific teams or organisational objectives. This led to a wide range of volunteering roles, across a broad spectrum of activities, and whilst generally our volunteers have felt supported and valued, this unstructured approach has however created some challenges. For example, data on our volunteers is inconsistent, fragmented and spread across a variety of databases. There is a lack of consistent policies, procedures and guidance pertaining to volunteering; and our existing communication practices are focused on particular roles rather than volunteering as a whole.

Improving our data and our information management will allow us to be more strategic in our approach and improve the way we communicate with our volunteers. We will be able to maintain an up-to-date picture of our volunteering landscape, analysing volunteers’ experiences as part of our process for measuring, understanding and demonstrating the impact of our volunteering programme.

Having in place the correct policies, procedures and guidance will enable us to more effectively identify and manage risks and it will help staff to feel supported and empowered in their role as managers of volunteers.

By improving our infrastructures and establishing an integrated and consistent approach for everyone who is involved in volunteering for the RTPI, we will be equipped to adequately support volunteers, involving them in our decision-making when required, engaging them in our business development where appropriate, and empowering them to deliver RTPI activities with confidence and aptitude.  This structured approach will be underpinned by our renewed commitment to supporting volunteers’ professional development, recognising that for our volunteers to flourish and for our programmes to prosper, our volunteers should be equipped with appropriate skills and informed of delegated authorities and of the relevant parameters for decision-making.

We will achieve this objective by:

• Improving communications; connecting volunteers across different areas of volunteering, enabling everyone to see the bigger picture and the contribution that volunteers make to the Institute, its members and their communities.
• Raising the profile of volunteering internally across the Institute and externally amongst our stakeholders and recognising and rewarding the contribution that volunteers make.
• Getting the basics in volunteering right: ensuring our volunteering is safe, legal and meets best practice requirements.
• Ensuring our policies and procedures which effect volunteers are relevant and supportive.
• Collecting and utilising knowledge from volunteers and staff to improve support for volunteers and empowering staff to improve our responses to volunteers.
• Offering a range of learning and development opportunities, providing volunteers with the skills and knowledge to carry out their roles.
• Developing a variety of methods for delivering volunteer learning and development, including face-to-face training, webinars and written guidance.
• Providing ongoing learning, development and support to staff who manage, support or work with volunteers to ensure volunteers receive the best support available and that the Institute can maximise our volunteers’ potential.

We benefit from a committed and energised group of volunteers, who are working with us towards our shared objectives. It is often however not enough just to know how many hours our volunteers have contributed, how many events they have organised, or to how many consultations they have contributed. Rather than simply measuring how much time our members have spent volunteering, it is far more rewarding for them to know what they have achieved during that time and for the Institute to understand the impact and value of their collective efforts in order to plan, prioritise and reinvest in our volunteers.

Collating quantitative data is of course important and we will use it to measure performance, not least because it will enable us to more accurately account for staff and volunteer time and to continually improve our resource management. Therefore tracking the number of volunteer hours worked is important but it does not really give us a sense of the impact of that work and so we will leverage a variety of data to assess the value of our volunteers’ work such as the number of people (members and non-members) served by our volunteers or the amount of money saved by our volunteers’ activities.

Qualitative data is not as cut-and-dry as numerical figures, i.e. it is about assessing outcomes rather than counting them. The risk of qualitative analysis is that it can be subjective or not fully indicative of performance. That said, qualitative review will form an integral part of our virtuous learning cycle by enabling us to better understand the human element of RTPI volunteering, i.e. to record and translate perceptions and experiences of and ideas for volunteering. This may include surveying our volunteers or the people who have benefitted from their activities, testimonials or before and after interviews, or longitudinal case studies following particular volunteering activities.

Finally, we will evaluate volunteer work and our volunteer programme by setting realistic and measurable goals. These will include a combination of short and long-term targets and will be tied to expected final outcomes.

We will achieve this objective by:

• Aligning local network objectives with the RTPI’s Corporate Strategy by relating, translating and reporting our volunteers’ contribution to the achievement of RTPI’s overarching strategic objectives.
• Understanding and articulating the purpose and intended impact of existing and new volunteer roles.
• Measuring the growth of RTPI volunteering.
• Focusing on the Social Return on Investment of our volunteering versus staff-delivered membership services.
• Measuring the financial impact of volunteering and the cost efficiencies that volunteering provides the Institute.
• Adopting a consistent method for storing and managing volunteer data and maintaining a central record of volunteer data.