Challenge
A volunteer-run environmental charity was struggling with the effort involved in recruiting and bringing up to speed reliable volunteers who could contribute meaningfully to the charity’s work. They needed an efficient onboarding process that could bring values-aligned volunteers into the project with minimal effort from the charity’s core team.
Approach
I joined the charity as a volunteer service designer. I helped to set up and steer a team of volunteers through a service design project that sought to improve the volunteer onboarding experience.
I established working rhythms by scheduling weekly remote working groups and sharing brief updates to the group’s Slack channel. I also worked with the group to set a shared ambition for the project and created a welcome deck for new working group members that outlined our ambition and project milestones.
As a group, we reviewed past research that had been carried out with volunteers and shared our insight into what was working and what wasn’t with the wider charity. We used our own experience as volunteers to create user journey maps of the onboarding experience. We spoke with other members of the organisation to develop this into an ‘as-is' service blueprint that made the pain points and opportunities visible. We also wrote user stories that described the needs, goals, and motivations of volunteers engaging with the organisation. We then invited circle chairs and engaged volunteers to a solutions workshop where we shared our insight and facilitated proposition development and prioritisation exercises.
Outcome
Our work resulted in a clear and shared understanding of onboarding and broader volunteer experience issues, and a set of prioritised solutions that could address these. At the time that my engagement with the charity ended, we also had a timeline of proposed design work for the team to move forward.