Talk:Volunteer Strategy Gathering/November 2014/Feedback

This is the central page for feedback from the Volunteer Strategy Gathering held on Saturday 29 November, 2014.

Suggestions following the November 2014 event

The following suggestions for this event were made by different people following the previous event.

Newbies

• Follow-up on progress since the last meeting.
• Summary of the Post-It mania Y (see here), and a list of concrete suggestions what the chapter could do, for discussion.

Project-based volunteering

• More workshops, maybe some hack-space e.g. to work on developing tools or ideas on the Wiki.
• More specifics on how project-based volunteering would actually work in practice. Who would decide which projects get supported? What specific mechanisms would we use to ensure our charitable funds are spent wisely?
• As I said, I think a "teamwork" discussion is needed. There was little enough chance in Birmingham for volunteers to express their views of how the current "volunteer strategy" is run. (...) There really need to be a session to grasp the nettle, and deal with staff and trustees' need to be pro-active in making life easier for volunteers who want to be involved with the chapter, in return for asking that volunteers are more thoughtful about resources and impact.

Fewer presentations

• Event organisers: I think the previous event had all of the elements it needed, so I'd like to see more of the same. The only thing I would change is fitting in slightly fewer presentations/activities to leave more time for discussion and getting to know new people. The actual discussions within the activities were brilliant, but we lacked the time to refine any of the ideas proposed.
• Fewer presentations and more discussion. Discussions of the gender gap or fundraising are very interesting and important, but deserve more time than can be afforded in a short slot and aren't directly relevant to the problems of volunteering within WMUK.

Newbies

• More new people coming
• Bring more new volunteers in. Volunteers working together on potential projects.

Other

• It felt like after each talk, we didn't have feedback as to what we could concretely take home and act upon. And the event became a bit too political at the end... unavoidable however it would've been nice to have a healthy debate rather than just sporadic chatter.
• Something on strategic thinking - we had a lot of the ingredients of strategy on the day but…
• The later afternoon lacked structure so people who wanted to swamp the conversation with points of view did so easily rather than help the group to expand their understanding of the topic
• The train journey to Birmingham was fine for me, but I couldn't have arrived at the meeting any earlier than I did (a bit after 10)....so I would prefer something low key to start the meeting. Y Key note won't be until 11:00 am

General points

Volunteer roles, accountability, communication and grants are of concern to our community

• Response: We plan to address this by moving to a project oriented approach, developing specific volunteer roles through various volunteer panels, and developing project planning processes which bring our efforts (including communication) together.

The charity has not been good at helping to develop and incubate ideas

• Response: Agreed. We are specifically inviting comment on the best process and platform (e.g. software) to do this. The creation of expert panels may provide the high-level directional ‘road markings’ for that, while a volunteer engagement panel should look in detail at implementation and process. Working groups should drive it forward.

We ought to be clearer about our offering, ie what we can do for volunteers and what volunteers can do for us: this must be a two-way process to maximise our common open knowledge impact.

• Response: We accept the point. People work with us because as an institution we have expertise and reputation, we become a hub for focussed activity and we work best when we work together. We can provide targeted funding, and support to find funding. We can support project development, helping to support internal (volunteers, movement) and external (organisations we work with, funders, media etc) communication and impact stories. To be further discussed at the next Volunteer Strategy Gathering.

See also

• Technology workshop 2014-15