How and why does Reach review opportunities?

How do you review opportunities?

Our Service team checks each opportunity to ensure that it meets our criteria. First we check that the role:

• Is based in the UK.
• Requires three or more years professional experience in one of our skills areas.
• Is unpaid.
• Is not overburdensome on the volunteer (for example, line managing paid staff or requiring more than 15 hours a week).

After these initial checks, we ensure that:

• The skills selected match the role/person description.
• The opportunity does not contain several different roles in one description.
• The opportunity is not an copy of an existing role in the same region  

We may also check your submitted role against other instances of the role you may have published (i.e. on your website) to ensure transparency and accuracy.

If your opportunity does not meet our criteria, we will ask you to amend your opportunity or signpost you to alternative services. 

Why do you review opportunities?

Reach is a charity that supports other charities and non profit organisations to find skills-based volunteers. We aim to help organisations by ensuring our service meets their needs and that the volunteer opportunities that they promote through us attract the best possible match. In order to do this, we review all opportunities submitted to Reach against a set of criteria.

The most successful placements happen when the organisation is clear about the specific skills that they require; to support a successful outcome, as part of the screening process, we may ask you to amend or clarify your advert.

How do you determine if my opportunity meets the criteria?

Our Service team reviews the selected skills and the content of role descriptions, in particular the person description, to ensure it meets our criteria.

We will review your person description carefully to ensure it is clear that you are explicitly looking for someone with professional experience in the skills that are selected or reflected in the role description. If this is not clear in the person description, we will ask you to either amend your role or suggest different services that would be more suited for your opportunity.

We’ll check to ensure that your role reflects the need for a volunteer with existing experience. We are unable to publish roles where the skills selected appear to be desirable rather than essential, or where it is clear from an organisation’s posting of the role in other places, that the role does not require expertise in one of our skills areas. 

Please note, we are not able to accept roles where no prior experience is required, including where full training is offered, with the exception of lived experience trustee roles. 

We do allow organisations to recruit for trustees with lived experience, with or without specified professional skills. In these roles, we will check that all other criteria are fully met.

Why has Reach removed my application pack? 

We review opportunities and additional packs, to check that they do not contain contact details or links to external recruitment pages. If they contain these, we will  delete the contact details or additional pack.

We will let you know we’ve done this, and you’ll be able to send us a copy without contact details to upload if you like.

As a small charity, we rely on application and placement information to support funding applications and record our impact.

We have found that when adverts include contact details and direct volunteers away from the Reach platform, we can lose key application and placement data. As such, we kindly ask that all initial communication with volunteers takes place on the Reach platform.

I need to recruit trustees with lived experience, can Reach still help?

Yes. We can accept opportunities specifically for trustees with lived experience of your cause, either with or without specified professional skills.  The rest of our criteria will still apply.  

Volunteers who don’t meet our criteria for professional skills but would like to apply for a lived experience role are welcome to apply using a ‘guest’ account. If they don’t have a CV, they will need to add a covering letter instead, but they don’t need to disclose any details that they’re not comfortable sharing.