Bringing in a trusts research volunteer

This webpage is for trust fundraisers with three or more years’ experience. Beginners should use this page instead.

Where I was when I wrote this page, we had a team of three staff (and one volunteer bid writer at two days a week – a skills trust fundraiser who’s trying to get back into work after injury). I have about three days a week from research volunteers, which is about right for our needs. If we were trying to grow income from small trusts, rather than large which is the current focus, I could do with a full-time research volunteer.

A research volunteer can start out working on:

• Identifying funders from the annual reports of charities in your line of work:

•  Checking funding newsletters to see if anything looks relevant
•  Keeping on top of things like funder fair dates
• Drafting some paperwork and doing some admin
• Sorting out folders
•  We have a few problems getting some monitoring data, so the volunteer also does some calls to service users to fill the gaps. (I’m not sure this is a safe way to go, because it opens the question of “Which team should collect the data?” – but we felt we had no choice.)

Once they’re experienced, we move them onto:

•  Interviews for case studies
• Service user involvement for lottery bids
• More detailed screening of trusts to see if they would fit a particular funding opportunity. This involves you working out what you’re doing in your head to choose the trust and putting the points down as a list of criteria
• I’ve also seen then used when Services have really struggled to fit in impact monitoring and we’ve had a surfeit of volunteers.

Ethical considerations

This comes up in discussions of volunteers, over whether volunteers are being exploited by doing, unpaid, work that staff should be doing. My own view is:

• A lot of this is work that a skilled layperson can do, rather than  needing the skills of professional trust fundraiser.
• The volunteers I’ve worked with have really enjoyed it. It’s low pressure, interesting work and because I’ve kept them informed of the results, they’ve felt they were doing something meaningful, making a difference.

Necessary qualifications to do the work

• Educated to “A” Level or beyond. (If you go below that, you will waste a lot of time checking and rechecking the work)
• Enjoys detective work
• Okay with relatively repetitive tasks
• Okay with the volume of work; okay if sometimes the work comes in fits and starts
• If they’re talking to the end user, in my view they should be DBS checked (though it will probably depend on the service users group and to a lesser degree the culture of the charity)

It’s not always easy to get volunteers, but if they’re around and have the ability, grab them! Given the choice, I prefer retired people because they ted to settle for longer periods if they are happy with the work. I’ve had people do this both working from home and in the office.