In the midst of COVID-19 when services had to move online, the need to improve digital solutions became apparent. As a result of this, Catalyst and The National Lottery Community Fund launched a COVID-19 Digital Response. This initiative aimed to help charities improve their digital capabilities, rethinking and redesigning processes to improve systems and experiences.
Successful in our bid, Parents 1st UK joined a funded collaborative project with other charities delivering early years volunteer initiatives to work with a digital developer to explore how the volunteering model could be improved or redefined.
Identifying a common issue…
Alongside Building Resilience in Communities (BRIC), Home Start in Waverly and The Developer Society, work began in January 2021 to understand what improvements could be made. Initial meetings explored common issues and ideas on systems that would benefit the wider volunteer community.
It was agreed to create a Volunteer Tracking template to streamline multiple processes and enable more efficient management of the volunteering experience which would in turn improve their entire journey with us as volunteers.
Records could be kept in a variety of places: on paper, Excel spreadsheets and other programmes such as Salesforce, so it was felt a comprehensive data reporting system was needed to follow the complete admin process and efficiently keep all records in one place.
Creating a solution…
We wanted to create a digital solution to collate this valuable data and to be able to have staff access it remotely to improve both the operation of the programme and the volunteer experience through one efficient, streamlined process.
The Developer Society listened carefully to our needs and felt Airtable would be the most appropriate solution. Airtable is an online relational database tool. It stores relationships between your data, and you can then use those relationships to filter and understand the data. It’s easy to use and extremely versatile. You can use it to manage, track and organise data, and much more.
Next steps…
The initial project to build a template ended in March 2021, however Parents 1st UK felt that we’d really like to further develop what we’d started to create a more bespoke system that was easily shareable and adaptable by other organisations delivering perinatal peer support. So, we put in a further funding grant application.
Catalyst approved our funding grant and work to develop it further began in May 2021. This time we worked with an independent developer specialising in AirTable – Tom French from ‘Work with Tom’.
We mapped out the entire volunteer process: recruitment campaigns, initial interest, running taster courses, interviewing, DBS, references, induction, training, supervision, supporting families, impact measurement to endings (and much, much more!).
We shared it with Tom who created an Airtable template from that map. The key aim was to create one picture of all the processes, enabling the team to easily see who was doing what, when it had been done, what was overdue and each person’s role in creating an efficient and valuable volunteering experience.
We drew on expertise from two peer support programmes who use the Parents 1st UK Community Parent model who both contributed to and tested the final system to ensure it was fit for purpose.
Airtable has been a great opportunity to keep all information in one central place that everyone can access. Since becoming office free, paper documents have now become online documents, and it was often hard to know where to store them in a place that would work for everyone.
Already we have made some slight adjustments to ensure it better reflects the stages of our volunteers, so it is still a work in progress, but that is what I like about the system as it’s not set in stone. It also saves me time as once I have amended the attendance records it automatically sends out the course session information to the learners.
It’s great for new enquiries as it alerts me straight away and I know that all the information is stored in a central place rather than trawling through different files and looking through my emails.
Zoe Jarvis, Volunteer trainer at Parents 1st Essex
The final template has streamlined multiple processes, enabled more efficient management of the volunteering experience and is easily accessible remotely, supporting the move to home working.
Airtable gives programme coordinators, managers, trainers, improved oversight of the whole volunteer management process, ensuring volunteers feel valued and supported. Moving forward we are now better equipped to monitor quality elements, identify bottlenecks, and ensure objectives are being met.
Celia Suppiah, CEO Parents 1st UK
By the end of the process we achieved:
- A fit for purpose AirTable template for tracking volunteer journeys.
- Trained staff with the capability and confidence to use the new system.
- An outline plan for further developing AirTable functionality to improve the efficiency of other programme management processes.
The finished template is currently being tested in practice by both Parents 1st Essex and Derby Community Parents Programme. We eventually hope to produce a general template that will be available to freely download and adapt on www.parents1st.org.uk. Watch this space…!