Volunteer Makers strengthens the future of volunteering in Museums – by Clare Lyall, Museum expansion Director at Trowbridge Museum

On the 10th November,Trowbridge Museum staff attended an excellent Volunteer Makers workshop run by Claire Sully, discovering how they could utilize a pioneering app to enable us to develop an effective strategic approach to volunteering.

The software provides you with a digital platform which you then build upon to create a volunteer community which encompasses different types of volunteering. These can vary from supporting your marketing by tweeting about your events, to assisting with Learning and Outreach activities, to cleaning your collections.

The possibilities are quite literally endless. This excellent system enables you to engage with far more of the wider community and offers that community a far broader range of volunteering opportunities with greater flexibility. It also enables museums to measure the huge value of volunteers in terms of economic impact, sustainability and diversity.

In a period when the number of those who are volunteering is actually going down and many people increasingly regard themselves as time poor, the Volunteer Makers app can only strengthen the museum sector’s position.