Graeme was instrumental in helping DRiNKLiNK achieve Volunteer Friendly status. He tells us why this is such an important accolade and gives tips to other causes looking to achieve this standard.
What is the Volunteer Friendly Award?
The Volunteer Friendly Award is a simple, user-friendly quality standard designed by Volunteer Dundee to support, recognise and reward groups who are good at involving volunteers.
Why is it important to DRiNKLiNK?
DRiNKLiNK has always been well supported by the community and we wanted to apply for the volunteer award to make sure we had the infrastructure in place to help DRiNKLiNKers in building their confidence and skills through helping others. This will be a continued challenge for us however with ambitious plans for 2019 into 2020, we are confident that on achieving this award we can scale up whilst delivering rewarding volunteer experiences.
What steps would you recommend organisations looking to achieve this status take?
Step 1: Get help
ACVO provide an essential service in helping us achieve this status. Reach out to Mike Melvin Mike.Melvin@acvo.org.uk and he will give you the toolkit you need to put the necessary infrastructure in place.
Building the polices, procedures and quality management system will take time too so make sure you recruit a team who can help you with the day-to-day tasks.
Step 2: Create realistic policies and procedures
It’s important to create realistic policies and procedures, otherwise what you have built won’t be implementable.
Before signing off on these documents, reach out to the managers of the departments who will be rolling these out to ensure the policies and procedures are realistic and manageable.
Step 3: Implementation is key
A fancy policies and procedure bank is a waste of time if you don’t integrate these into daily behaviours.
Assign a volunteer coordinator who will take control of this and monitor your performance both regularly and objectively to make sure you are continuously operating to the highest standard.
How can someone get involved with DRiNKLiNK?
To find out more about the volunteer opportunities at DRiNKLiNK, visit http://www.mydrinklink.org/gies-a-hand/volunteering/ or email info@drinklink.org.
Thank you to everyone who helped us in achieving our volunteer friendly status. Click here for our policies and procedures bank. Partners looking to benefit from our experience on this should email Graeme.wood@drinklink.org.