Volunteer management in students' unions
People are selfish, but that's OK
Why students turn up and join in, and how we can make their experience wonderful in the process
In August 2023 we went along to Membership Services Conference hosted at the Students’ Union at Manchester Metropolitan University. We presented a session about:
Getting in - helping students to know opportunities exist & getting them in the room
Staying in - retention & reward of volunteers
Sweet endings - closing off the volunteer journey
We wanted to simplify the fundamentals of good quality volunteer management for a students’ union audience. There’s loads of guidance out there about how to be a great volunteer manager, but not so much for student volunteers. It really is simple in theory, but the reality is that you are time poor and usually working on minimal budgets too. So this blog (and the presentation) gave some simple steps for improving your student volunteer management practice.
We’ve summarised the learnings from the session into shortened bullets. For the full presentation scroll to the bottom.
Getting in
Focus on motivations. The more you know about why students want to do something, the more you can lean into that. There’s a rumour in HE that the main reason is for CV filling, getting skills for employment. That’s definitely a motivator for lots of students, but evidence suggests that the primary factor that gets them to sign up is ‘wanting to improve things and help people’.
Great quality volunteering and social action experiences have a double benefit - the activity benefits society, a cause, community but also benefits the student - developing their skills, confidence, helping them to make friends
When they’ve signed up, making sure the welcome is really welcoming is the key to getting them through the door. Training student leaders to give a top notch intro to the session and provide great joining instructions will help with this
Staying in
Identify your drop out areas. Are there particular activities that lose student interest after the first session? Maybe some groups get hundreds of sign ups but only a few people actually show up. Getting to know this stuff will help to work out where changes need to be made
Matching motivations to rewards will unlock deeply engaged students. Merch and awards parties are nice but for some students this just isn’t interesting. Knowing why a student got involved and what they want out of it means you can thank them in a way that’s meaningful to them.
Students’ unions are educational charities, but often the developmental journey of students in opportunities are an afterthought. How can you go beyond functional ‘how to’ training on booking rooms and making financial transactions? All opportunities should offer learning and development.
Sweet endings
Students finish their time volunteering and unless they attend the annual awards, they often go without even a thank you from their SU. Make time to thank them personally (albeit via email) when they finish.
Sometimes an opportunity isn’t right so they stop getting involved. That’s OK, but thank them for their involvement anyway. Perhaps it’s a chance to signpost to other stuff that may interest them?
Exit interviews are great for the more engaged students that your team know personally. Think about how this can be done for larger numbers of students. Perhaps peer group mentoring could work?
The full slide deck can be viewed on Canva. Click on the image below to take you to the slides…
