CARING COMMUNITIES USING COMMUNITY MAKERS

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Tickbox, with a small number our charity partners, have been busy developing a new version of our successful Volunteer Makers platform in 2022. Community Makers extends the Volunteer Makers tech to provide care and wellbeing benefits in our communities, driven by our communities.

The main purpose of our Local Care for Local People plug-in – using Community Makers is:

  • Giving informed Care Seekers choice and control on how their support is delivered that is flexible, creative, and local!
  • Creating an inclusive community-driven environment, building networks and trusted relationships
  • Demonstrating value for money using Individual Service Funding
  • Grow micro-care givers and innovating new models of care
  • Support care programmes and brokerage

Community Makers tech (inspires a connected community, promotes participation and volunteering, events, actions and opportunities). This allows for:

  • Volunteer opportunities, micro, remote and regular
  • Impact reporting
  • Social capital value
  • Event management
  • Content Management System

If you want to find out more, contact us.

COMMUNITY MAKERS HELPS SERVICES IN NOTTS FULLY BIND TOGETHER

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“It’s a win-win situation for us, our volunteers and the communities they are drawn from,” says Liz Guildford, projects and logistics manager at Inspire: Culture, Learning & Libraries.

Liz is talking about Tickbox Marketing’s Community Makers tech, which Inspire have been using since a soft launch with her organisation during lock down.  Community Makers expands the Volunteer Makers‘ platform and can be used across locations and partnerships.

Community Makers helps Inspire attract, manage, organise and provide challenges (which are actions, activities or events) for hundreds of volunteers throughout Nottinghamshire.

Inspire delivers a variety of educational and cultural services in the county and just beyond: These include running libraries, delivering adult learning, running arts projects and even providing music education.

The diverse nature of Inspire’s remit and the varying communities and premises in which they are delivered provided the organisation with a challenge when it came to engaging the community.

“Things were organised ad hoc, with volunteers recruited by local services and usually only working in a specific role,” explains Liz.

“There were no tailored criteria in place for these people and they had to go through the very formal and rigid county council recruitment process.”

Now, Community Makers – run by a dedicated Volunteering Officer within Inspire – can tailor specific opportunities, suggest new tasks and tap in to the micro-volunteering trend with people helping in very specific ways, when they can.

“It’s absolutely brilliant having all our volunteer data in one place. Not only does it help us cut down on paperwork, but there is a cross-pollination with volunteers.

“People who may have, for example, worked helping out in a library on occasions are seeing our challenges to help with the running of a one-off cultural event in the evening and getting involved,” Liz notes.

“Some challenges are big and require regular commitments, but others can be as small as helping publicise some of our work on social media – even a retweet helps!”.

As well as migrating over their regular volunteers, Inspire has found the technology has helped inspire new and more diverse helpers to get involved and participate.

“Whereas traditionally, many volunteers were retired people and more likely to be found in more prosperous areas of the county, we are seeing all kinds of people engage now,” Liz expands.

“We have people looking for work experience to help them get a job, and we can point them to services that support them, and a lot of younger volunteers. We even have some 16-year-olds involved.”

But how are older volunteers finding the new platform?

“I did at first wonder how some might manage,” admits Liz, “But the feedback has been positive and many love using it.”

“The Pandemic has helped many people to acquire new online skills and confidence, and, of course, they can still telephone our Volunteers Office if they want to get in touch that way.”

At present, Inspire’s Community Makers platform is offering 24 challenges for volunteers, but as the various teams within the organisation start using it, Liz hopes this will grow to 50 plus within the next few months.

The take up for the current challenges has been impressive:

“We always believed once we got it up and running it would take off – and it has,” she concludes.

“Volunteers feel like they are really part of the teams they are working with, they are being ambassadors for our services and are bringing in fresh ideas and enthusiasm. It is really bonding us with the communities we serve.” 

Laptop displaying UOC Volunteer Makers website

UNIVERSITY’S CHALLENGES ARE A HIT WITH VOLUNTEERS

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Housing some of the most valuable and irreplaceable artefacts in Britain, University of Cambridge Museums is a heritage group like few others.

With eight widely different museums and a botanical gardens, all operating in a semi-autonomous manner and tied to one of the world’s greatest universities, UCM has a history of working closely with local communities in innovative ways.

It was following in this tradition that UCM began working with Tickbox Marketing’s Volunteer Makers team a few years ago, unveiling a new volunteering platform driven by Volunteer Makers tech in its website last year.

“Volunteer Makers gave our institutions a joined-up approach, while allowing each museum to set its own challenges and adapt things to its own needs – it isn’t a prescriptive ‘one size fits all’ approach,” explains Nikki Hughes, UCM’s Opening Doors project co-ordinator.

Nikki has championed the Volunteer Makers system at UCM and as familiarity grew with the concept, it is now used by most of the institutions to engage and inspire volunteers and manage their tasks.

UCM now has over 1000 Volunteer Makers, from all walks of life, and these helpers interact with its museums in a variety of ways.

“For some it’s completing a challenge that may only take an hour or so, for others it is helping with a specific task for a day, while others take up front-of-house duties on an ongoing basis,” Nikki notes.

“From our point of view, Volunteer Makers has been a great boon in managing the administration of this. In the past, we might have had bits of paper flying about between museums whereas now its digital, its measurable and we can track precisely,” she adds.

The Covid-19 lockdown has meant UCM’s institutions have had to get inventive in its challenges – but as could be expected – it has risen to the challenge.

Volunteer tasks could be as diverse as recording nature sounds from their own gardens, to getting involved in the Museum Remix project – a way in which the public could get involved in reinterpreting USM’s artefacts, and help redesign displays and layout.

As the doors to the various collections begin to open up again, Volunteer Makers has helped recruit volunteers to work in front-of-house roles, in outreach work and to run specialist tours.

“Volunteer Makers has made filling these roles so much easier and just as importantly it has allowed us to keep the public engaged with us while the lockdown kept doors closed,” Nikki says.

“We wanted to keep the community engaged with and interested in UCM and Volunteer Makers has been an invaluable tool for doing this,” she concludes.

Take Part Oldham homepage on a laptop

OLDHAM SHOW HOW TO REACH PEOPLE – EVEN IN LOCKDOWN

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The coronavirus emergency has left us with all sorts of challenges, including how to remain connected with others and still benefit from being part of community. For heritage, arts and other charity organisations the question is how do we remain connected to volunteers and supporters? And how do these organisations continue to build their numbers in order to thrive during and after lockdown.

Take Part Oldham’s Volunteer Makers has launched during the most difficult time in our country’s post-war history, but it has hit the ground running and built engagement with local organisations, helped by Volunteer Makers.

Volunteer Makers embodies Tickbox’s “tech for good” ethos: Using tech creatively and strategically to connect communities, building engagement and allowing measurable benefits to flow.

The Arts, Heritage, Libraries and Music services in Oldham have got together to create Take Part Oldham, an online space using Volunteer Makers, that makes it easy to see what community activities local people can get involved in. What is significant is Take Part Oldham launched during lockdown. Take Part Oldham has 37 creative challenges running and has signed up more than 100 people (and rising) to take part remotely.

Music is an important part of the heritage, libraries and art grouping that makes up Take Part Oldham and one challenge asks people to stage an impromptu gig in their gardens at 4pm any day they choose.

The results are uploaded onto social media and as well as keeping up morale (and raising a few laughs) in these difficult times, the initiative links in the community with the arts in Oldham.

Another creative challenge gets people to post online book reviews: a great lockdown idea which not only encourages reading but builds engagement with Oldham libraries, who are tagged in by this virtual book club.

Keep fit meets the arts when Oldham Theatre Workshop’s Craig Harris holds a series of streamed daily warm-up exercises. The public can log on and warm up like a professional actor in a challenge that builds engagement with the theatre.

Lockdown means being inventive with challenges, but lots of people online with lots of time on their hands equals a great opportunity for reaching out and making connections with the public. Connections that should last even when the virus is vanquished. Connections that may last a lifetime.

Slide from presentation

Volunteer Makers showcased to the movers and shakers

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Tickbox were invited to join a number of museum and heritage organisations based in the South West and South East to share best practice and learning around managing volunteers.

The Museum Volunteer Co-ordinators Forum was held in Swindon on February 27th and the theme was “Tools and Tips for Better Working”. It was organised by South West Museum Development (SWMD) and their South East counterpart: South East Museum Development (SEmuseumDP).

Both SWMD and SEmuseumDP are ACE-funded museum development programmes that enable museums in their regions to evolve and thrive.

Around 50 + delegates joined the seminar to hear case studies, share ideas and best practice and network. It was also an opportunity to hear from companies like Tickbox about tech that can inspire. Volunteer Makers is an engagement model and technology product designed to help organisations establish/grow a supporter/volunteer community. It also provides useful tools to manage volunteers.

Volunteer Makers has been driven by collaborative working with heritage organisations, started around 6 years ago with Luton Culture and Museum Makers. It helps organisations think through and deliver their volunteer strategy.

Engage in Gloucester – Volunteer Makers has been working with Volunteer Makers for the past 2 years and the Engage in Gloucester platform was launched in October 2019. Since then it has gone on to have a significant impact for Gloucester Culture Trust and their 62 heritage partners.

“Engage in Gloucester has shifted the face of volunteering for Gloucester,” said Director of Gloucester Culture Hollie Smith-Charles at the event. “We have got better at thinking through accessible volunteer opportunities and thinking what’s in it for the volunteer. This has led us to effectively reach the people we need to, including younger people – who make up 40% of the population”.

Other speakers sharing their volunteer  management experience included:

Paola Palmer, Still Curious Project Coordinator and Hampshire Cultural Officer, The Red House Museum.

Hollie Foskett-Barnes, Membership Co-ordinator, Museum of East Asian Art, Bath.

Joy Todd, Head of Volunteering and Community Engagement, Gardens and Museums (GLAM), University of Oxford.

Tickbox MD and Programme Director for Volunteer Makers Claire Sully was asked to give a brief introduction to Volunteer Makers to further support the case study provided by Hollie Smith-Charles for Engage in Gloucester.

Claire said “Seeing Hollie demonstrating the positive impact of working with Volunteer Makers for Engage in Gloucester was very exciting. We know the tech is great, but the important thing is what the tech enables and for Gloucester this has been something quite extraordinary.”

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