traceymealing's blog

Sue Ryder Care currently has 6,000 people nationwide volunteering in its 370 shops, 17 fundraising teams, 14 care centres and support service teams.

Through volunteering, individuals can not only gain invaluable work experience and develop skills needed to thrive in a work environment but can also support charities such as Sue Ryder Care.

Volunteers are essential to charities like ours. Every year Sue Ryder Care needs to raise £13 million in voluntary income to continue to deliver expert and compassionate care at its six hospices and eight neurological care centres, as well as community based services, nationwide.

The additional income generated from our fundraising and retail divisions, as well as savings on employment costs, through the recruitment of volunteers has helped us maintain our existing services for the people we care for.

To ensure we maintain our strong and effective volunteering team, attention to volunteer recruitment and retention is vital.

Recruitment of volunteers

Changes in society and the changing face of volunteering mean that we need to look at new ways to attract the type of volunteers who have not traditionally worked with us.

Creating and promoting volunteering roles that are mutually beneficial has enabled us to attract volunteers of all ages with different skills to offer.

We actively promote over 450 volunteering roles on our website, the widest selection of volunteer roles within the volunteer charity sector, and develop bespoke roles for people where relevant.

Over the years volunteering has evolved and become much more diverse and professional. Creating roles that will provide the volunteer with transferable and useful skills to enable the volunteer to secure paid employment will help you appeal to school leavers and parents keen to return to work. In today's increasingly socially responsible environment, volunteering is viewed in a positive way by prospective employers too.

We also utilise our relationships with companies who have selected us as their charity partner to secure volunteering support. For a company, supporting a charity in this way is a great way to demonstrate its commitment to corporate social responsibility.

Another way we recruit volunteers is through our Prisoner Volunteer Programme. Last year the Programme placed 71 carefully selected prisoners in volunteer roles in our shops, providing 36,000 hours of valuable support and saving the charity £216,000 on employment costs.