Child Bereavement UK: A 'whole charity' approach to volunteering

Introduction

Child Bereavement UK helps families to rebuild their lives when a child grieves or when a child dies. The charity supports children and young people (up to the age of 25) when someone important to them has died or is not expected to live, and parents and the wider family when a baby or child of any age dies or is dying.

The Challenge

In the last year, Child Bereavement UK provided over 8000 support sessions for children, young people, couples and families, and delivered 299 training courses, training nearly 6000 professionals including teachers, doctors, social workers and emergency services.

Child Bereavement UK has seen the fallout of the pandemic not only in increased demand for its services but also in the complex nature of people’s bereavements. Restrictions and measures put in place during the pandemic prevented many bereaved people from accessing the support of family and friends and from attending funerals and saying goodbye as they would have wished to.

Child Bereavement UK responded to the pandemic by finding new ways to support people online and now operates a hybrid model, providing both face-to-face and remote support.

The Solution

The team is committed to offering the best volunteering experience possible and their ambition was to work more closely with volunteers, growing the volunteer program and keeping volunteers engaged.

However, before using Rosterfy, volunteering administration processes were onerous, based mainly on spreadsheets.

The charity used volunteers across the organisation but there was no centralised system. It was recognised that a single, all-in-one platform to communicate opportunities was needed to achieve – as Lorna describes it – “a whole charity approach to volunteering.”

When asked about how Lorna migrated Child Bereavement UK’s volunteering program to Rosterfy she said “One of the most challenging things you’ll come across when going from zero to a platform like Rosterfy is gathering all the information you need from all the different areas within your organisation.

We didn’t have anyone internally coordinating the whole volunteering experience, so the first action was to set up a working group.”

Lorna recognised that everyone across Child Bereavement UK’s services had different requirements. It was important they were given an opportunity to highlight what was important to them. For example, some services put an emphasis on screening whilst for others, which for other services was not a concern. 

For Child Bereavement UK, getting buy-in across the organisation was achievable by having a single, easy-to-use system for sharing volunteer information. “You adapt as you go, you learn as you expand, but when you’re putting in place processes or automation that works for everyone, then everyone benefits,” confirms Lorna.

“Once you have Rosterfy in place it’s so much easier. Acknowledge that the people in your organisation have other deadlines but if you can get this right it’s going to be so much better for everyone.”

The Impact

Child Bereavement UK is able to communicate as a whole organisation to their volunteers in a simplified and time-efficient manner. Now everyone follows processes, and because of automation, no one misses training or important communication.

When asked how they intend to measure the return on investment from Rosterfy, Lorna said “It’s hard for many organisations to measure the difference in impact, particularly because they probably weren’t collecting much data prior to having Rosterfy. But now we’re able to start collecting insights and it builds a picture of the hours offered by volunteers, the time saved and how our volunteer programs contribute towards the success of the charity.” 

Lorna Murchie, Fundraising Partnership and Engagement Manager, Child Bereavement UK

Lorna said, “One thing we know we can measure and where we can see the difference is the impact Rosterfy has on the likelihood of our volunteers recommending volunteering at Child Bereavement UK to a friend.”

Over the last year we have improved our processes for communicating with our volunteers and we’ve seen greater satisfaction among volunteers as a result. Rosterfy has been a big part of making this possible.

Lorna believes a lot of the increased satisfaction and engagement their volunteers are experiencing comes from the increased visibility of opportunities, volunteering more often, and receiving more frequent and timely communication.