Customer Story: National Autistic Society

Background

Autism is a lifelong developmental disability which affects how people communicate and interact with the world. More than one in 100 people are on the autism spectrum and there are around 700,000 autistic adults and children in the UK.

Volunteers are at the core of the National Autistic Society - and much of the support they offer autistic people couldn’t be done without them. Laura Clark, Head of Volunteering, has been with the charity since 2007. We recently visited their Glasgow base to meet with Laura and Sandra, Social Programmes Manager, to understand how volunteer management software, Assemble, is making a difference.

Our volunteers

“We have around 1000 volunteers with a diverse range of roles from supporting autistic adults or children at social groups to being involved with admin support.

We have volunteers who are involved in our services offering their unique skills to bring added value to those we support.

We have recently launched our heritage project where volunteers will play a key role in celebrating the history of the National Autistic Society.

We also have our branch volunteers which make up over half of the number of volunteers we have. We have over 100 branches across the country and our amazing branch volunteers provide advice, support and lead campaigning in their local communities. Branches and branch volunteers are an integral part of what we do.”

Need for change

"Before Assemble volunteers were being managed locally by their volunteer manager or coordinator and it could be difficult to get an overall picture of the diversity and reach of our volunteers and the support they provide.

When it came to assessing our needs, we wanted to be able to have all of our volunteering information in one place with standardised processes and functions. We knew this would offer consistency for our teams, improve our volunteer journey and enable us to be able to collaborate better on a both a local and national level.

We also knew it was important to get a good overview of our volunteering but then have the ability to drill down into the different projects and groups with analytics that measured the impact our volunteers are having."

Why Assemble?

"Being able to automate our volunteer recruitment and induction processes was essential, while still keeping a good and hands on relationship with our volunteers.

We wanted a volunteer management system that would reflect the structure of our organisation and how we were setup. We felt that Assemble was flexible in terms of configuration and could not only support our needs as a central team but would work on a local level too.

Another big consideration was the ability to maintain the processes we already in place, whilst improving the volunteer journey. We knew with Assemble, that we could standardise what we had - and bring these online.

Finally, it appealed to the needs of our volunteers in the features and functionality it offered. We liked how straight forward and user friendly it seemed and how our volunteers could use the app to keep up to date and manage their volunteering.

We could see that the team behind Assemble really understand volunteering and this played a huge part in us being aligned from the start."

Streamlining our processes

“The biggest improvement is easily the streamlining of our volunteer recruitment. Being able to follow some simple steps to create and publish a recruitment advert, with the peace of mind that this will take applicants all the way through the recruitment journey, is revolutionary.

One of the best things about Assemble is the automation of references. We have found that references can be returned to us within just a few hours – something that might previously have taken weeks to chase manually. What’s more, the take-up rate of references being completed has been vastly improved, meaning we are getting far fewer drop-offs through the applicant stage.

We are now able to onboard volunteers within a few days of applying and the stages of recruitment through Assemble mean nothing is missed. The average time it takes to clear a volunteer to start has been reduced from approximately a month to 2 to 3 days depending on role.

We can see that since using Assemble, Volunteers feel more connected to the wider organisation. They are able to keep up to date with what is happening within our charity through the news pages and can share or accept invites to our meetings for all staff and volunteers.

By offering a standardised process with Assemble, our volunteers each have access to the same great experience with us throughout their volunteer journey, even if they have been volunteering with us for a number of years."

Favourite feature

"Hard to pinpoint just one so my highlights include the recruitment tools, because this process has been totally modernised and streamlined so it's been great to get more visibility around what opportunities are available at the National Autistic Society. For my team, it’s easy to manage, but more importantly, it's easier and far quicker for applicants to apply and start volunteering.

Being able to monitor leavers – and reasons for leaving - has also been useful. Making sure that we are able to close eLearning accounts when a volunteer leaves or having the ability to automate the release of record that are no longer needed is a great feature,

Some projects have found being able to record the number of volunteer hours a useful tool for funder reports.

To have an ‘at a glance’ breakdown of volunteer numbers and other demographics in an instant is a game-changer."

Challenging change

"Some volunteers have been more resistant to change than others – and we had expected this might be the case. We have found that those recruited through Assemble are inherently more confident using it and will self-serve, finding any documents or information they need with ease. Whereas existing volunteers are more reluctant to log in or perhaps may not use the full features and functionality available to them.

To counter this, we recently created some ‘how to guides’ that we share with volunteers to encourage them to use Assemble. Our volunteer managers can see the benefits of the software for volunteers, so sometimes it’s a case of reaching out and building confidence. This might be offering support or simply signposting volunteers to the information they need within Assemble."

What’s next for volunteering at the National Autistic Society

"We are now confident that our volunteers can be recruited safely and compliantly, within our policies and guidance. Having our documents and procedures controlled centrally with a standardised recruitment process means we can be far more dynamic in advertising new volunteer roles quickly and efficiently, with the comfort of knowing the volunteer experience is reliable and consistent.

Assemble has also enabled us to have all of our volunteers in one single space. This will inevitably improve how we manage and communicate with our volunteers, as well as keeping track of what is working for them in terms of engagement.

Ultimately, having our processes locked down should free up some time to focus on continuing to develop and improve all areas of our volunteering."