Summary

The Whole Story

Research + Discovery

What are volunteers' motivations?

• Career advancement and experience/upskilling.
• Passion for the refugee cause.

“Part of my motivation to volunteer was to get experience and put something on my CV.”

How do they get involved with volunteering?

• Know about the organisation through social media, word of mouth, FTF classes.
• Classes can spark interest for those with no volunteering intention.

“I was impressed by the professionalism of 2 chefs at End-Of-Year corporate event and that prompted me to find out more about FTF.”

Is the volunteer prepared for the role?

• Some volunteers were thrown in the deep end without adequate training.

“We made mistakes due to lack of training being provided for that particular role.”

What do volunteers expect from management?

• Volunteers like having an accessible manager.
• Volunteers want structured and clear guidelines and goals.

“Sometimes I didn’t have clear direction about what I should be doing as a volunteer.”

Why is feedback important?

• Feedback helps to keep expectations aligned.
• FTF is doing well on that now, but will need a scalable solution.

How do you keep volunteers happy?

• Recognition makes volunteers feel appreciated. It doesn’t need to be a grand gesture.
• Meeting volunteers' expectations — up-skill, personal growth.
• Big emotional reward seeing their impact from volunteering.

“I would have really liked to know how the refugees progressed after I finished volunteering.”

Why do they leave?

• Some volunteers burn out and need a break.
• Many left due to misaligned expectations or poor management.

“Poor management made me stop volunteering for the organisation.”

Ideation Workshop

We conducted an ideation workshop with Daniel from NTL. We wanted to involve him in the process because he had so much in depth domain knowledge that we wanted to utilise. We also wanted to use it as an opportunity to show him the key research findings and start to introduce some of our ideas. The outcome of the session was some really valuable insights into ideas Daniel had in his head but had not written down or explored further. We could then use this as a base to ideate on further and start to map out a service blueprint.

High Level Flow

We started with a high level flow to define the service episodes. This also helped us introduce the idea of a service blueprint to Daniel as showing him the full blueprint straightaway may have been overwhelming.

Recommendations

Below are some key recommendations extracted from the service blueprint.

Awareness

Free to Feed Cooking Classes

• Utilize cooking class to recruit volunteers into NTL and FTF.
• Provide hosts and instructors with promotional material.
• Collect contact information from interested parties to potentially recruit as volunteers later down the track.
• Provide a showbag which can include: FTF apron, recipe cards, a spice pack that was used and information about how to volunteer.

Website and Online Presence

• Post often to online channels like Instagram and Facebook.

Sign Up

Website

• Promote and advertise specialised volunteer positions in a traditional job format.
• Utilise online application forms that input directly to Salesforce.

Interview

• Set clear expectations for both NTL and the potential volunteer.
• Require volunteers to state their desired outcomes (practical experience and skills to learn) as part of volunteer assessments and interviews.

Induction

Learning about NTL

• Introduce volunteers to NTL including the organisation's purpose and vision.
• Introduce Slack as a great tool for volunteers to share knowledge and build a community.

Training

• Provide a training sessions for general soft skills, such as active listening and trust building.
• Leverage other organisations and partners (i.e. ASRC) to conduct training workshops.

Matching

Matching Process

• Compare skills needed by entrepreneurs to skills of volunteers.
• Based on demand and how specialised the skill is, it will either be set up as a class or one-on-one training

Notifying Volunteers

• Send an e-mail informing the volunteer that they have been matched to a entrepreneur.
• Provide a link to Calendly to schedule first meeting with entrepreneur.
• Include an entrepreneur profile including a summary and intro video.

Sessions 

Group Classes

• Cover general concepts.

One-on-One Sessions

• Check up on individual progress via specialised classes.

First Meeting

• Host in a common space with an NTL staff member to talk over goals and book future sessions.

Tracking

• Email a form via salesforce after the session for the volunteer to give feedback and track learning progress. This gives the volunteer a chance to bring up any other issues or concerns.

Review

Scheduled reviews between volunteer and volunteer manager

• Provide the volunteer with a chance to address any issues.
• Use structured questions to help NTL pinpoint any unseen problems.
• Review expectations and commitments.
• Consider opportunities to give the volunteer increased responsibility.
• Gauge possibility of volunteer burnout.

Exit

• Frame it as a temporary break and that they are welcome back any time.
• Keep them connected to the volunteer community and the NTL network.
• Leave volunteers with references (letter of recommendation) or access to professional networks to support their career development.
• Encourage entrepreneurs to send a personal thank you to volunteers that mentored them as part of exit process.

Other Recommendations

Acknowledgements and Rewards

• Host events to celebrate key milestones (1 year anniversary, 100 sessions etc).
• Provide free tickets to FTF cooking classes.
• Thank volunteers on the website and keep them up to date on the entrepreneur’s progress.
• Connect volunteers with NTL professional network to hold training sessions to develop their skills.
• Provide LinkedIn recommendations/endorsements to volunteers.

Volunteer Community

• Encourage practice of more experienced volunteers mentoring less experienced volunteers (skills exchange).

Service Blueprint

The service blueprint was supplied to Daniel as a Google Sheets document so he could edit and tweak if needed. However we also supplied him with high fidelity version made in Adobe Illustrator that was easier to read and follow.

Horizon

We also came up with a few recommendations for future directions once the base service had been established.

Awareness

• Aim for a large database of volunteers.
• Release seasonal cookbooks or zines.
• Promote NTL through university placements/projects.
• Partner with professional associations to promote volunteering opportunities (CPA, ACS, LIV etc).

Volunteer Community

• Develop a 'buddy' program and host team building events.

Volunteer Training

• Explore online skills-based training for volunteers looking to upskill in a certain area (Udemy, Lynda etc.).
• Create a training program for developing soft skills.

Key LearningS

Daniel from NTL was a great client, very accessible and interested in what we could achieve, however it quickly became apparent after our first meeting that he didn't really know what UX design was and what sort of outcome we could produce. An extremely important lesson I took from this experience was how important client engagement is and setting up expectations. It also showed me how important it is to really dig deep into the business with the client to get a clear understanding of what the client is trying to achieve and where the design opportunities may lie.