From September we’re making it easier for your VCSE organisation to add volunteering opportunities to our website. To explain a little more about how this will work and why we’ve developed a new process, we’ve answered the following questions.
If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact our York Volunteers Team via Volunteering@YorkCVS.org.uk
What do you need to do?
Any opportunities you currently have on our outgoing Volunteer Recruitment and Management system (powered by Be Collective) will be copied over to our new incoming simplified system.
Any opportunities you currently have on our outgoing Volunteer Recruitment and Management system (powered by Be Collective) will still appear nationally on Be Collective’s website until the closing dates you’ve set (or indefinitely if they don’t have a closing date).
If you still want to continue using the features of our outgoing Volunteer Recruitment and Management system (powered by Be Collective):
For example, for monitoring your volunteer hours etc, you can do, you will just need to do it directly through the Be Collective main website, as our portal to this system will no longer be available on our website. Please note your use of Be Collective+ features will end in January 2024.
If you don’t want to advertise or receive applications through Be Collective as well as our new incoming simplified system:
On 9 September (or later) go to Be Collective’s website and login using the email and password you usually use to login in to our outgoing Volunteer Recruitment and Management system (powered by Be Collective). Then follow this guide to shut down your organisation’s account on Be Collective. Do not do this before 9 September or your opportunity may not get copied over to our new incoming simplified system.
What will this mean for you going forward?
Recruitment only
Our new website will facilitate Volunteer Recruitment only. There won’t be Volunteer Management features anymore, but we’ll still be hosting our Volunteer Management Forum and provide lots of information and advice on our website.
Less admin
No setting up accounts. No logging in. No setting up different admin. No complicated help guides necessary. Just a short simple form that will prompt all the information we need.
No paywalls
No features will be behind paywalls – it’s really important to us that all our services are free for you to use!
More feedback
It’s a difficult climate for the VCSE sector and volunteering. We’ve seen a lot of Volunteer Centres across the country close down. We’ll continue to offer our services for free, but with ever more challenging impact targets, we’ll be asking for your help and support. We need more feedback and details about the numbers of volunteers who come through our service so that we can evidence why this service is needed in our city now and in the future.
Why the change?
Simpler processes and more accessible
We received feedback from organisations that a simpler, less IT-reliant system, would make volunteer recruitment more accessible for them.
Keeping our services free
With our current system, we took on additional costs to ensure VCSE organisations had access to all the free features the platform offered. However, when Be Collective changed their pricing plans, which meant lots of features required individual organisations to pay, we decided it was time for a change.
Achieving York’s City Wide Volunteering Strategy
With our new process we can continue to achieve our intended aims for the system for recognition, sharing skills, and monitoring outlined in York’s City Wide Volunteering Strategy.
Able to easily fix things
Our previous system encountered a lot of errors and when things went wrong we were reliant on an office based in Australia to fix them. Our new system will be entirely owned by York CVS, so we’ll have more freedom to make the changes you want and fix things if they go wrong.