Digitising your hospice: Understand volunteer data with detailed central reporting

Volunteer data has an influence across multiple facets of your hospice. Whether this is the tangible impact that volunteers contribute via their role, acknowledging their demographics for diversity purposes, or ensuring that training and GDPR requirements are met, this information can provide a clearer insight into your hospice.

For your Volunteer Managers, volunteer data is a golden ticket to success. Knowledge is power, and with these key insights, it allows Volunteer Managers to report on volunteering and make informed decisions that ensure your hospice is able to work safer and smarter. 

Volunteer management software supports hospices to gain a clear insight into their organisation by easily reporting on key metrics and recording volunteer data centrally with customisable records. This data is therefore safely stored in one place and can be used to support your Volunteer Managers’ plans surrounding volunteer communication, management and reporting.

With the assistance of a VMS, it ensures that volunteer records are both complete and accurate, whilst minimising administrative tasks, freeing up time to make the informed decisions that will develop your processes. A VMS will therefore support the key areas of your hospice by allowing you to:

Adhere to compliance responsibilities

A VMS can assist in this area as its reporting functionality provides you with an audit trail to track and show crucial information surrounding health and safety, GDPR and other key training compliance. By accessing central volunteer data, you can ensure these are kept accurate and up to date.

In addition, a competent VMS will be built with secure data storage and auto-anonymised records to your organisation’s policies.

Since implementing Access Assemble, Chris Bartell, Volunteer Coordinator at St Luke’s Hospice, has found it easier to work with governance bodies, by sharing:

"I can simply screenshot the report and send it to my manager or governance committee. They don’t have access to the system, but this makes sharing data quick and easy."

Read more about St Luke’s experience with Access Assemble

Understand the demographics of your volunteers

A VMS’s detailed reporting allows you to swiftly retrieve information surrounding your volunteers such as their volunteering hours, use of resources and activity levels, and general engagement.

Another crucial area is diversity and inclusion data. Based on this information, 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 create an environment that is welcoming to all.

Find out more about the importance of championing diversity

Acknowledge the impact of your volunteers

It’s crucial to gain both a qualitative and quantitative perspective of your volunteers’ influence.

Where a CRM can provide insights into the former, a VMS allows you to run a volunteer impact report that shares your volunteers’ tangible contributions to your hospice. For example, this could provide details such as the training that they have undertaken, or how many people they have served in your hospice retail shop. Based on this information, you can see firsthand the positive input that is being made, which can be communicated by acknowledging their efforts, while providing positive feedback.

Do you have a CRM? Find out more about why you should also consider investing in a VMS

Apply smarter task management

Gaining a clear insight into your volunteer’s performance can also allow you to make informed decisions as to how best to utilise their skills. For example, the reports may show that they excel in one area of their role over another. You can therefore apply this information to your task management processes, choosing to task certain volunteers with activities that you believe will benefit their skillset, which would help support your hospice’s mission.

Your volunteer data says a lot about your organisation. And how you choose to interpret and action these insights will determine how you develop your hospice to enhance the volunteer experience, while ensuring that you operate to a safe standard.

Are you interested in finding out more about how Access Assemble could support your hospice? At Access, our volunteer management software experts are available to point you in the right direction and answer any questions you may have. Speak to a member of our team.