Literacy Pirates: Automating 90% of the volunteer pipeline

Introduction

A volunteer programme making a real impact on child literacy

Children in the Literacy Pirates’ after-school programme can make 5 months’ progress in reading in a single term, building their confidence and perseverance for success at school and beyond.

More than 500 volunteers support this work each month, helping children improve reading and writing skills. To expand volunteer involvement without increasing administrative burden or expenses, Literacy Pirates harnessed the power of Rosterfy’s volunteer management software. 

By automating onboarding and creating a self-service experience, the team can now spend more meaningful time supporting volunteers rather than handling paperwork.

The Solution

Welcome aboard with a streamlined onboarding process

Literacy Pirates have created an onboarding experience that’s completely aligned to their brand and mission. Volunteers are welcomed to the crew, complete a profile, and are guided through online training hosted in Rosterfy. Progress is automatically tracked, simplifying data capture for staff with volunteer information and onboarding progress stored in one place.

Previously, the Literacy Pirates had a three hour training and safeguarding session, which was demanding on volunteers’ time. With Rosterfy this has reduced to one hour, creating a self-service onboarding experience that fits volunteers’ busy schedules.

Self-service onboarding has led to a reduction of more than a third in the time it takes to complete the volunteer journey.

Automating 90% of the volunteer onboarding pipeline

Automation has become a key part of how Literacy Pirates manages its growing volunteer community – supporting applications, background checks, and training.

Previously staff spent significant time manually guiding each volunteer through the onboarding process – around 30 minutes per volunteer. By introducing automated workflows and self-service steps, volunteers can now move through the journey independently, reducing the need for manual intervention.

With 30–45 volunteers completing onboarding each month, automation saves the team around 15–22 hours of staff time every month. 

Creating a volunteer journey that suits your programme

Volunteers working with children require a higher level of screening and checks than most volunteer programmes.

The Literacy Pirates onboarding pipeline ensures:

• Basic information is collected upfront
• Engaging content during applications
• Step-by-step online training
• Background and screening checks at the right stage
• Visibility of progress for volunteers and staff

Volunteers must complete a background check, but it’s important to request this at the right time. Literacy Pirates have to pay for each background check so it’s important to make sure that’s spent on applicants likely to complete the process.

By tracking applicant drop-off in Rosterfy, the team found it was more effective to request background checks later in the process.

These changes have improved the volunteer conversion rate to 30% while reducing the costs for unnecessary background checks.

Reward and recognising volunteers

Literacy Pirates have a unique reward and recognition programme that is directly linked to volunteer profiles on the Rosterfy platform.

Each crewmate is rewarded with badges for completing certain milestones such as their first session, every 10 subsequent sessions and reaching the milestone of 100 sessions.

These badges are both physical and digital with milestones displayed in each volunteer’s Rosterfy profile.

The Impact

Faster onboarding: Self-service and automation have reduced the volunteer journey by more than a third.

Higher throughput: 30-45 volunteers complete onboarding each month, ready to start supporting children with their literacy skills.

Active volunteer growth: the number of active volunteers has increased by 80% in just two years, from 300 to 540.

More meaningful staff time: Automation reduces admin by 15-22 hours per month, allowing staff to focus on recruitment and directly supporting volunteers in their roles.

Scaling without extra resources: A team of three manages a community of 1,700 volunteers, including 540 active volunteers, without increasing overhead.

Improved conversion: 30% of applications successfully onboard, ensuring the right volunteers progress through the pipeline and contribute to the cause.

Rosterfy has given Literacy Pirates more visibility of their volunteer application funnel and small changes can make a big difference.