Championing diversity in volunteering: The key methods to promoting your values

Diversity in volunteering is essential as it brings people together to create a more inclusive environment that promotes learning and understanding, while breaking down barriers and stereotypes.

For example, life experience and perspective play a fundamental role, as do demographic differences such as ethnicity, age, and gender.

By actively facilitating diversity, it supports organisations to enhance problem solving and creativity, while allowing them to better resonate with and reflect the communities that they serve. 

Discover how understanding the diversity of volunteers helped support the RSPCA’s volunteer experience

Although encouraging diverse volunteers is universally accepted, it’s crucial to understand the reasons why. More than just a trendy buzzword, diversity and inclusion can play a major role in the development of your organisation. The key standouts include the following:

Broader range of skills and perspectives

Let’s face it, if everyone thought the same way, life would be pretty dull. Volunteering works very much the same. By onboarding a diverse set of volunteers, it allows you to also recruit diversity of thought, skills, and experience. Encouraging these diverse elements allows your volunteers to work together effectively to overcome complex issues and develop fresh, innovative ideas of how best to serve their community.

More accurate community representation

If you serve a diverse community, it’s paramount that your organisation is reflective of this. By doing so, it ensures that your organisation is increasingly relatable and accessible to your wider audience, fostering trust and enabling you to build stronger connections with various groups. Not only will this demonstrate the commitment to your community, but it will encourage your audience to buy into your organisation and support you via event attendance, donations, or volunteering.

Dynamic problem solving and adaptability

Each individual has their own skills and experiences. Volunteers from varied backgrounds are therefore likely to demonstrate unique approaches to problem solving, making the team more resilient and flexible. Embracing this type of diversity will equip your team with a varied skillset, enabling them to be adaptable and effective when responding to obstacles or unpredictable situations.

Prioritising cultural competence

Depending on your community, aspects such as various cultures, languages and social contexts will be important to acknowledge. Recruiting volunteers whose demographics are relevant to these demonstrates strong cultural awareness by better meeting the needs of individuals from these backgrounds. By taking this definitive step, it strongly supports your organisation to deliver a quality service.

Stronger engagement and retention

Nothing lasts forever. And with volunteering, it is inevitable that a volunteer’s time with you won’t be indefinite. However, providing a welcoming, inclusive environment fosters a sense of belonging that helps support a healthy volunteer retention rate. Volunteers who see their identities and experiences reflected within your organisation are therefore more likely to feel valued and remain engaged.

Are you wondering how best to manage your diversity and inclusion information? Our Access Assemble software can help facilitate this crucial area of your organisation.

Recognised as specialist volunteer management software, Access Assemble was built with diversity at its core. Our solution allows you to swiftly retrieve and analyse key diversity and inclusion data, with the support of built-in statistical reports that can drill into information dating back to 2016. With this information available at your fingertips, you can gain a clear insight into whether your organisation meets the mark where inclusivity is concerned, and if not, make informed decisions to ensure that you do.

Depending on which Access Assemble package you opt for, our diversity and inclusion feature provides:

• Flexible diversity question and answer options
• Additional control of your questions and answers (Enterprise package only)
• Secure permission-based data access
• Insightful reporting functionality
• Swift diversity monitoring setup

Find out more about our volunteer diversity and inclusion feature

Championing diversity in volunteering is essential to developing a welcoming environment for your volunteers, while ensuring that your organisation successfully resonates with your community. The introduction of volunteer management software can make this process easier by gaining access to clear insights surrounding your volunteers, allowing you to make informed decisions that will develop your organisation.

At Access, our professionals are available to answer any questions you may have regarding Access Assemble or the software’s volunteer diversity and inclusion feature.