How we mobilised volunteers for the vaccination programme in 4 months
Back in November 2020, there were a lot of conversations about the British Red Cross being involved in the vaccination programme. A figure was quoted that made me nervous that we could be looking at recruiting 2,000 volunteers ready for March. It made me nervous because I’d worked in volunteer recruitment at British Red Cross for years and this number was substantially more than we’d ever recruited in a year, never mind in 4 months. However, we did achieve what seemed impossible!
During my career, I’ve investigated incidences where things haven’t gone well and always found that it’s never one thing that led to things going wrong, but a series of things combined that led to it happening. And reflecting on how we achieved this I realised it’s also the same when things go right, I think if one of the elements below had been missing, we wouldn’t have achieved what we did. So, what were these things?
1. Systems
In 2019 the British Red Cross undertook a comprehensive study looking at the volunteer experience. The study ultimately revealed that when our volunteers interacted with people, they had a great experience, but when they interacted with our systems and processes, they in the main had negative experiences. So, we embarked on finding solutions to improve that experience, and sourced a new volunteer management system, Assemble, that improved what we knew to be pain points for our volunteers.
We were due to start rolling out this system in a phased, planned approached in 2020¸and then the pandemic hit. British Red Cross made the decision to use this system for our response to COVID and although this resulted in a very messy implementation of the system within the organisation, the advantages it brought about were worth living in the mess for!
Assemble allowed us to quickly develop new volunteering roles, so when we learned about being involved in the vaccination programme, we were able to develop a series of volunteering roles which were adapted for regional differences.
Assemble allows you to tailor questions during the application and onboarding stage, which allowed us to ask different questions depending on what was required for those roles. This really helped us in onboarding the right people.
The system also has automation features such as sending for references which freed up time for the recruitment team to focus on other things.
Our previous system could not do these things, and although I know we probably would have made it work with the old system, I do not doubt that we would not have been able to recruit the volume we did in the time we did without Assemble.
2. People
At the start of the pandemic, it was really hard to try and estimate what the need would be for the Red Cross and thanks to a number of locally run support groups being set up the demand wasn’t as high as we had originally expected. However, we had to be prepared for there being a high level of demand. In 2018, thanks to sponsorship from Avia we launched Community Reserve Volunteers. This scheme would allow people to come forward to offer their help to us in case we needed them in an emergency. Because of the uncertainty regarding what the demand would be for our services, we decide to promote people signing up as Community Reserve Volunteers and the Mirror helped us with this by launching a Power of Kindness campaign. The results were amazing, our Community Reserve Volunteer pool shot up to nearly 90,000 people!
However, as I mentioned before the demand for our support wasn’t as high as we originally thought due to these wonderful local community groups that were formed, so unfortunately some of these people who signed up to help were not contacted.
So when it transpired we were going to need a large volume of volunteers for the vaccination programme I was adamant that we did an internal campaign first to our formal volunteers and our Community Reserve Volunteers before we went external.
And this yielded a great response, on average 10% of volunteers we contacted about the opportunity signed up, and we were able to do this in a targeted way, only going out to volunteers in that area when we were certain there was an ask.
This involved a lot more work upfront and often meant we needed to work more quickly as when requests came in volunteers were often needed asap. But because these volunteers were already warm to us as an organisation, the majority responded to the ask within hours
3. Strong desire
Something that I perhaps hadn’t considered enough when I heard the first initial figures being discussed was how passionate people would be about helping with the vaccination programme. Some of the roles we were recruiting to were in partnership with St John Ambulance and involved vaccinating people. This role involved some difficult and intense training, but people took it in their stride. Normally we are chasing people to do their training, but this time people were chasing us and asking: “When can we start our training?”
This desire was also evident from the staff and volunteers who were involved in support behind the scenes in recruiting these volunteers. We had a wonderful group of volunteers who were interviewing people coming forward as vaccination volunteers. These recruitment volunteers gave up hours of their time to interview.
Everyone was impacted by the pandemic and people were very motivated to help with the vaccination programme to help us return to normality. The demand for volunteers was slightly less than thought in November, however by March we had recruited the 1,600 volunteers that were needed.
Our support in one of the first vaccination centres we supported in, Newham, recently came to an end. We held a thank you event to thank the 200 volunteers who supported there. It was so wonderful hearing the difference these volunteers had helped make and also the difference volunteering made for those volunteers
I’ve worked for The British Red Cross for thirteen years now and being involved in our volunteering response to the vaccination programme has been one of the most challenging things I’ve ever embarked on, but also one of the most rewarding.
A huge thank you to all the volunteers who came forward to help with the vaccination programme, you are the real stars, we just played a small part in connecting your kindness to those who needed it and hopefully made that experience a good one for you!
