Challenge
A volunteer-run environmental charity was struggling with the effort involved in recruiting and bringing up to speed reliable volunteers that could contribute meaningfully to their objectives.
They needed an efficient onboarding process that could bring values-aligned volunteers into the project with minimal effort from the charity’s core team.
Role & Responsibilities
I joined the charity as a volunteer service designer. I helped to steer a team of volunteers through a service design project that sought to improve the volunteer onboarding experience.
Rituals and Rhythms
I established working rhythms by scheduling weekly remote working calls, and sharing brief updates on project progress 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 group’s ambition and an overview of project milestones.
Approach
Our initial project outline, set by that charity’s director, was to review previous primary research on the volunteer experience that had been carried out by past volunteer researchers and use that as stimulus for a solutions workshop.
However, after analysing the primary research we found that our understanding of the onboarding process was incomplete and so introduced the following activities.
– 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 used the research to write user stories that described the needs, goals, and motivations of volunteers engaging with the organisation.
Once we had a clear understanding of core issues from multiple perspectives, we 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 led to 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 forwards with.