A walk through the importance of good volunteer recognition, & what the evidence tells us about how to make it effective.
About this event
Ahead of Volunteers Week 2022 1-7 June 2022, we are hosting this workshop to give us the opportunity to ‘revisit’ Volunteer Recognition and what it means to our organisations.
This one hour Zoom workshop will be a walk through the importance of good volunteer recognition, we’ll explore what the evidence tells us about how to make it effective and how we can adjust our practice to get it right for different models of volunteering.
We will cover the following:
1. What do we mean by volunteer recognition?
Where does recognition fit within the volunteer journey – at what stages does or should it be considered?
Exploring national campaigns of volunteering recognition – Volunteers Week, Sports Personality of the Year and even clapping for key workers during Covid – what do these campaigns seek to achieve? And how can we use them in our own charities?
Challenges and opportunities volunteering’s current approaches to recognition
2. Why is recognition important?
What does the research and evidence tells us about effective recognition – examples of different approaches and how these are usually measured
What impact good recognition can have, and the consequences of not recognising volunteers
What good recognition can help you achieve in your volunteering programme
3. How can we do it well?
Some good practice examples from different contexts – individual thanks, within your charity and wider or national campaigns
Considering recognition for ‘workforce’, ‘customer’ and ‘ambassadorial’ models of volunteering – what kinds of recognition could work well for different types of volunteers?
4. Open discussion/Q&A
About Our Speaker – Gethyn Williams
Hailing from Cardiff, but now living in Cambridgeshire Gethyn is a volunteering specialist who’s worked across the UK voluntary and community sector for twenty years, including senior roles at Volunteering Matters and Join In – the volunteering legacy charity from London 2012. This combination of strategy and analysis, operational management and business development has given him something of a helicopter view across the modern volunteering landscape.
A recognised national thought leader in volunteering, during the Covid era Gethyn worked as a Senior Policy Advisor at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, focusing on data and trend analysis and designing strategic policy interventions in volunteering. Working at the heart of national Covid operations, over the past 18 months he’s brought his experience and insight to keynote speaker and panel member roles at national conferences delivered by Groop, Team Kinetic, Health Education England and the NUS.
Now working as a freelance consultant, Gethyn supports a wide range of clients to help them reinvent key aspects of their volunteering programmes, a role he defines as visioning, fixing and optimising. These include Local Authorities, National Museums, youth empowerment agencies and a range of local charities. You can read more about Gethyn’s consultancy work here: www.gethynwilliams.net/consultancy
