Volunteers have the skills you need

A skills-based volunteer is an experienced person who volunteers to share their professional skills with a good cause for a specific project or an ongoing role. The volunteer’s expertise could include a wide range of specialisms such as HR, digital, finance or marketing - areas which are generally under-resourced in the charity sector. 

Read more on skills-based volunteering and how it could help your organisation. 

Skills-based volunteers can make a huge difference to good causes, adding capacity, growing capability and helping them to innovate. Many charities are quite small and staff are often generalists, so the input of volunteers with several years of experience in a specialism can make a real impact. Skills-based volunteers can bring in expertise to back office functions that are crucial to the charity's work but are seldom well resourced.

For example: 

• If you need support with getting your accounts in order, but do not have the skills or resources on your team, you could recruit a volunteer bookkeeper.

• Want to update your charity's logo? You could recruit a graphic designer with experience in branding, who can help you to define your needs, and work with you to design a fresh new logo.

• Have a big data management project coming up but need support on where to start? Connect with a GDPR specialist to come in and advise you.

These are just a few examples of how skills-based volunteers can make an immediate impact and add immense value to charities. Read stories from other organisations.

We only accept opportunities that:

• require three or more years professional experience in one of our skills areas
• are unpaid
• are based in the UK
• are not overly burdensome on the volunteer, for example, line managing paid staff or requiring more than 15 hours a week

We do also accept opportunities specifically for trustees with lived experience of your cause, either with or without specified professional skills.

Read more about how and why we review opportunities.

It’s free to recruit skills-based volunteers on our self-service platform. 

If you’re looking to recruit trustees, we charge a small fee for charities or educational bodies with an income over £1m and for other eligible organisations with an income over £250k. This helps keep our platform accessible to organisations with less resources. Read more about our fees.

To contact a volunteer you must first have a live volunteer or trustee opportunity. If you’re new to Reach, you’ll need to register and then either create a profile for your organisation or join an existing organisation you are part of. You can then post an opportunity. Before publishing, our Service Team reviews all new roles to make sure they meet our criteria. 

Once your role is live, you can search for volunteers and use the 'Contact volunteer' button on their profile to ask them to apply to your role. Read more about how recruitment works on Reach.

We know a lot of organisations need help in areas they aren’t experts in, which can make writing role descriptions and requirements tricky. That’s why we have a bank of template role descriptions to help you design a role that fits the needs of your organisation. 

You can also take a look at stories from organisations that have found volunteers through Reach, to find some inspiration.