Collaboration: The rise of skills-based volunteering

One of the Vision for Volunteering themes is collaboration, which imagines a future where collaboration is natural and spontaneous, where people do great stuff together because they want to. In this blog piece, Ed Mayo (CEO of Pilotlight) talks about how they used the idea of collaboration to co-create the UK Pro Bono Association.

Skills-based volunteering, where individuals use their professional, occupational and specialist skills to support charities, has risen by twenty per cent since the start of the pandemic (NCVO Time Well Spent). This was boosted by employees on furlough who were looking to how they could bring their skills to bear to promote community action but the wave of positive innovation that came out of this in turn outlasted the lockdown.

The same period also marked the formation at a national level of an informal collaborative network of those of us who promote skills-based volunteering: the UK Pro Bono Association.

The Pro Bono Association, convened by Cranfield Trust, Pilotlight and Reach, involves a wide range of organisations who are bringing skilled volunteers in to support charities, sometimes as all they do, sometimes as part of what they do. The group meets once a quarter to learn openly from each other and to share tools and good practice, from how to match volunteers to how to build diversity.

In parallel with the Vision for Volunteering, we developed a ten-year vision for pro bono action. One proposition for example is that pro bono volunteering becomes embedded in professional development in every sector, as it has started to in the law sector; that it becomes part of what it means to be a successful professional, part of what you badge and talk about on LinkedIn.

A second proposition is that rather than a one-way exchange, from business to charity, we see skills-based volunteering as a form of mutuality, a practice of ‘skills sharing’, in which both parties can learn from each other. 

But we recognised too that there are two primary obstacles to reaching the potential that good quality skills-based volunteering has.

The first is that it is hard for charities to understand and access potential support in the form of skilled volunteers. The second is that it is hard for people with skills and expertise to find straightforward ways to use them for the public good.

In line with this, the first practical step from this collaboration was therefore a new initiative launched this summer to make it easier for small charities to access free professional support.

Seven out of ten small and medium-sized charities say that they are actively looking for pro bono professional skills to support what they do – but only four out of ten find it. The new initiative is designed to close this gap, with the charities offering pro bono and free support and services running a mutual signposting and referral service between themselves to ensure that charities find their way to the most appropriate help that they need.

It is not, as yet, a public tool, but one designed to enable collaboration across the different specialist providers of skills-based volunteering. In support of this, members of the Pro Bono Association each pledge that: “when charities or social enterprises come to any of us needing pro bono support that we are not able to give or that others could give better, we take steps to guide them to the support that they need.”

As our economy and society becomes more stretched and more complex, so the demands on all organisations, including charities, for skills seem likely to grow. But it is a super-power of the voluntary sector that we can bring in skills through volunteering that go beyond our limited financial means. Research by Pilotlight suggests that there is the potential for skills-based volunteering to scale more rapidly still, becoming an even more powerful potential source of support.

Around six million people (21% of the workforce) are putting their work skills into use on a voluntary basis and a further 50% would like to volunteer using their occupational or professional skills. Those who volunteer with the support of their employer are around twice as likely to be people of the Global Majority as the population at large (23% compared to 12%).

Perhaps most intriguingly, of those currently involved in skills-based volunteering in the workplace, 79% believe that the businesses themselves benefit from the practice.

In our field of skills-based volunteering, we are not an upstart. We see ourselves as one part of a larger and longer-established tradition of volunteering.

What we do have is a recipe for momentum. We are encouraged that through collaboration, we can start to turn visionary principles into tangible progress.

Ed Mayo is the CEO of Pilotlight