How to start a volunteer programme at a small UK charity: a step-by-step guide

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If you are the founder, the executive director, and the volunteer coordinator at your charity (often the same person, often you), most "how to start a volunteer programme" guides are written for an organisation three times your size. This one is not.

Volunteer programmes at small charities rarely fail because someone forgot to send a thank-you card. They fail because the one person doing the work is also doing the scheduling, the reminders, the donor acknowledgements, and the newsletter, across four disconnected tools, until they burn out and the volunteers drift. The honest small-org playbook is not a "volunteer programme" modelled on a 50-person agency. It is keeping volunteers and donors in one contact system, using a genuinely free scheduling tool for shifts, and protecting the two people who actually show up.

This guide walks through a readiness check and nine concrete steps to build a volunteer programme around your real bandwidth. Every template, checklist, and script promised below is delivered inline on this page, no downloads required.

For scale: there are around 170,000 registered charities in England and Wales alone (Charity Commission register), most of them run largely or entirely by volunteers. NCVO's Time Well Spent research is the most-cited UK reference on who volunteers, how often, and why they stay or leave. Even two reliable volunteers giving four hours a month is meaningful capacity you couldn't otherwise afford to hire.

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In this article:

• Why start a volunteer programme: the real impact for small charities

• Before you begin: assessing your charity's volunteer readiness

• Step 1: Conduct a volunteer needs assessment

• Step 2: Set SMART goals for your volunteer programme

• Step 3: Write your volunteer programme mission statement

• Step 4: Create clear volunteer role descriptions

• Step 5: Resources and capacity: build your volunteer tool stack

• Step 6: Recruit volunteers through multiple channels

• Step 7: Plan for the UK legal basics

• Step 8: Retain volunteers through recognition and growth

• Step 9: Measure success and improve your programme

• Common volunteer programme challenges (and how to solve them)

• Volunteer management tools: when to use software

• Frequently asked questions

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Why start a volunteer programme: the real impact for small charities

In most small charities, the "volunteer coordinator" is the founder, doing it on top of fundraising, communications, and programme work. The programme you build either makes that job easier or quietly burns the founder out. There is no third option.

So the honest case for a volunteer programme is not "free labour." It is this:

• Two reliable volunteers can give you back your week. If a recurring task eats four hours a week (event check-in, donor thank-you calls, social posts), two volunteers handling it is roughly 16 hours of your time back per month. NCVO publishes sector guidance on the value of donated volunteer time, which your trustees can use as a line item when reporting to the board or preparing the Trustees' Annual Report.

• The people are already there. The majority of UK adults report volunteering in some form each year, according to NCVO's Time Well Spent research. Your reliable two are in that pool. The question is whether your programme is easy enough for them to stick.

• Volunteers extend your reach without extending your payroll. A volunteer with marketing skills, a retired bookkeeper, or a trustee who runs an event are all capacity you cannot afford to hire.

For a small charity: the programme is worth starting when one founder-task can be handed off to a volunteer who shows up at least monthly. If you cannot name that task and that person, skip ahead to the readiness check before recruiting anyone.

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Before you begin: assessing your charity's volunteer readiness

Before you write a role description, answer these five questions honestly. There is no shame in a "no." A "no" tells you the right next move is not a programme, it is something smaller.

• 1. Do you (the founder or lead) have two to three hours per week to coordinate volunteers? That covers scheduling, replying to questions, sending reminders, and follow-up. Not the volunteer work itself: the coordination of it.

• 2. Can you provide meaningful, recurring work? A volunteer who shows up once and is handed busywork does not come back. "Help us at the annual gala" is meaningful but not recurring. "Make 10 donor thank-you calls every Wednesday" is both.

• 3. Do you have basic onboarding capacity? A one-hour orientation, a written role description, and one person they can ask questions of. If you cannot offer those three things, you are not ready.

• 4. Do you have ONE contact system, not two? If your donors are in one tool and your volunteers in another (or in a spreadsheet, or in your inbox), you are about to maintain two databases. That is the burnout machine.

• 5. Can you name the two to three reliable people you would start with? Real names. Not "we will recruit them."

If you answered no to question 1: do not launch a programme. Recruit two to three reliable volunteers for a single recurring task you would otherwise do yourself, put them in the same contact list as your donors, and revisit the programme in six months. The "programme" emerges from the people, not the other way around.

For a small charity: this readiness check is the highest-leverage 10 minutes you will spend on this whole project. Most programme launches that fail at the one to three person scale fail because the founder skipped this step.

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Step 1: Conduct a volunteer needs assessment

A needs assessment is not a strategic-planning exercise. It is a list. Answer these 10 questions in writing. Bullet points are fine. One sitting.

• 1. What tasks are you (or paid staff) doing right now that a volunteer could handle?

• 2. Which of those tasks are recurring (weekly, monthly) versus one-time?

• 3. What skills does each task actually require? (Be specific: "comfort on the phone," not "communication.")

• 4. What is the minimum time commitment a volunteer would need to give for the task to be worth your training effort? (One hour a week? One Saturday a month?)

• 5. What tasks cannot be handed off because they require staff judgement, signing authority, or access to donor financial data?

• 6. What tools would a volunteer need access to, and is that access free or paid per seat?

• 7. Who supervises the volunteer? (If the answer is "me, on top of everything else," reread the readiness check.)

• 8. What does "done well" look like for each task? Can you describe success in one sentence?

• 9. What is the consequence if a volunteer drops the task one week? Can the work wait?

• 10. Which task, if handed off, would give you back the most time?

Question 10 is the one that matters. Start there. Do not try to build a five-role programme on day one.

For a small charity: if your needs assessment turns into a list of 12 roles, you are designing for an organisation you do not have. Pick one task. Find two volunteers for it. The rest is hypothetical until the first task is running cleanly for three months.

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Step 2: Set SMART goals for your volunteer programme

SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. For a small charity, the trap is setting "achievable" too high because the enterprise guide you read sets it for a 20-person team.

Four examples calibrated to a one to three person org:

• Recruit 10 event volunteers by 15 March for the spring gala (specific role, specific number, specific date).

• Reduce founder administrative time by five hours per week by handing off donor thank-you calls and weekly social posts to two volunteers, by end of Q2.

• Retain two of three starter volunteers for six months on their recurring task. (Retention as a count, not a rate. Rates are not meaningful at this scale.)

• Run one volunteer recognition event during Volunteers' Week UK (1 to 7 June) with at least five volunteers attending.

For a small charity: two goals, not seven. Pick one capacity goal (give time back) and one people goal (retain who you have). Anything beyond that for the first year is decoration.

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Step 3: Write your volunteer programme mission statement

A volunteer mission statement is shorter than your org mission. It says: who volunteers are, what they do, what changes because of them. Two sentences is plenty.

A useful skeleton:

[Our volunteers] [verb: do, support, deliver, mentor] [who or what] so that [outcome]. We give them [what we offer them in return: training, community, a real role].

Real volunteer programme missions you can model from (publicly published):

• RSPCA volunteers rehome and care for animals alongside staff. The shared-labour framing is doing the work in the sentence.

• Macmillan Cancer Support grounds its mission in the people living with cancer that volunteers support, through Coffee Mornings, buddy schemes, and information services. The beneficiary is named.

• The Trussell Trust ties volunteer time directly to food parcels packed and distributed alongside referral partners. Volunteer effort and outcome are in the same sentence.

The pattern: name the volunteer, name the action, name who benefits. Skip jargon.

For a small charity: write the statement in 20 minutes, post it on your volunteer page, and move on. It will improve in version two after you have actual volunteers. Do not let it block recruitment for a month.

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Step 4: Create clear volunteer role descriptions

A role description is the single most useful thing you will write for your volunteer programme. It sets expectations, it filters out wrong-fit applicants, and it is the document a volunteer rereads when they are unsure what they signed up for.

Use this fill-in-the-blank structure for every role:

• Role title: [plain, specific: "Wednesday donor thank-you caller," not "Engagement Volunteer"]

• Time commitment: [hours per week or month, plus expected length: "2 hours per week for 6 months"]

• Where the work happens: [remote, in-person, hybrid; days and times if shift-based]

• Responsibilities: [3 to 5 bullets, each a concrete action]

• Skills needed: [must-have, plus nice-to-have]

• Training provided: [what you will teach them, how long it takes]

• Supervisor and check-in cadence: [name, how often you will talk]

• How to apply: [link or email, expected response time]

Three worked examples below.

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Example A: Event volunteer (one-time)

• Role title: Spring gala check-in volunteer

• Time commitment: 4 hours on 22 March, plus a 30-minute orientation the week before

• Where: Community Centre ballroom, in-person

• Responsibilities: greet guests, check names against the RSVP list, hand out name tags, point guests to the silent auction

• Skills: friendly manner, comfort with a printed list. Nice-to-have: previous event experience.

• Training: 30-minute walk-through of the venue and check-in process

• Supervisor: Director, check-in at start and midpoint of the event

• How to apply: reply to this email by 10 March

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Example B: Administrative volunteer (recurring)

• Role title: Wednesday donor thank-you caller

• Time commitment: 2 hours every Wednesday afternoon, ongoing

• Where: remote, from your home phone

• Responsibilities: call 10 to 15 donors who gave in the past week, read from a short thank-you script, log the call in the donor record

• Skills: warm phone manner, comfort with a simple online contact list

• Training: 1-hour orientation plus shadow one call session

• Supervisor: Founder, 15-minute check-in monthly

• How to apply: email a one-paragraph reason you are interested

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Example C: Programme volunteer (recurring, skilled)

• Role title: Saturday literacy tutor

• Time commitment: 2 hours every Saturday morning, six-month minimum commitment

• Where: branch library, in-person

• Responsibilities: work one-to-one with an assigned learner on reading practice, log session notes

• Skills: patience, written English at secondary-school level. Nice-to-have: teaching or tutoring background.

• Training: 4-hour initial training, plus monthly tutor meetups

• Supervisor: Programme Director, monthly group check-in

• How to apply: complete the application form and DBS check

For a small charity: three role descriptions are plenty for year one. If you are writing your seventh, stop and ask whether you are actually going to recruit and supervise that many. A clear role for two volunteers beats a vague programme for ten.

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Step 5: Resources and capacity: build your volunteer tool stack

This is the step most small-org volunteer programmes get wrong, and it is the step that decides whether the founder burns out. The question is not "what is the best volunteer management software." The question is: which tools can your volunteers use on a phone, in 30 seconds, without training, while you keep them in the same contact list as your donors?

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The one-contact-system rule

Your volunteers and your donors are mostly the same people, or they will be within 12 months. Maintaining two databases (a donor contact list and a separate volunteer roster) is the single most common reason small charities give up on volunteer programmes. You forget who has been thanked, who already gave, who is double-counted.

Use one contact list. Tag volunteers as volunteers. Tag donors as donors. Tag the (many) people who are both, both. You can manage volunteers and donors in one free contact list with Zeffy, including tags and saved segments, so a "thank-you to volunteers who also donated this quarter" email is one filter away, not a manual cross-reference.

Many of your volunteers are also (or will become) donors. Any donation from a UK taxpayer volunteer is Gift Aid eligible, worth an extra 25p per £1 reclaimed from HMRC. Keeping volunteers and donors in the same contact list means you can invite volunteers to add a Gift Aid declaration next time they give, without maintaining two databases.

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Tool simplicity beats tool features

The fanciest scheduling app in the world is useless if your reliable Wednesday caller cannot figure out how to confirm a shift on her phone. Pick tools by this test: can a 60-year-old retired teacher with a non-smartphone-native relationship to apps use it on her phone in 30 seconds, without you on the call?

If yes, it is a candidate. If no, it is the wrong tool, no matter how good the features list is.

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Onboarding and training basics

For each volunteer, on day one:

Orientation checklist (60 minutes total):

• 1. Mission and what the org actually does (10 min)

• 2. Walk through the role description, line by line (10 min)

• 3. Show the one or two tools they will actually use (15 min)

• 4. Cover safety and basic policies relevant to their role (10 min)

• 5. Answer their questions (10 min)

• 6. Confirm next shift and supervisor contact (5 min)

First-day agenda for their first real shift:

• 1. Arrive 15 minutes early. Meet the supervisor.

• 2. Shadow the supervisor or an experienced volunteer for the first hour.

• 3. Do the task with the supervisor present for the second hour.

• 4. Five-minute debrief: what felt clear, what was confusing.

• 5. Confirm their next shift before they leave.

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Training when you don't have a training department

You are the training department. That is fine. Three rules:

• Record the orientation once. A 20-minute phone video of you walking through the basics works. Send it to every new volunteer before their first session. You stop repeating yourself.

• Write the role description well enough that it is the training document. If a volunteer has to re-ask you a question you already wrote down, the role description is the problem, not the volunteer.

• Pair new volunteers with returning ones for the first three shifts. Returning volunteers train better than you do, because they remember being new last month.

For a small charity: the stack should be three tools, max. One contact system (where donors and volunteers live together). One scheduling tool, if you have shifts (see the tool section below). One messaging tool, which is usually email. More than three is a sign you are trying to look like a bigger organisation.

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Step 6: Recruit volunteers through multiple channels

Most small charities do not have a volunteer shortage. They have a recruitment-effort problem: they are pouring time into high-effort channels with low yield. Organise channels by effort:

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Low-effort: start here

• Ask current supporters. Send one email to your donor list asking who would like to help with a specific recurring task. Name the task. Name the time commitment. Most of your reliable volunteers come from this list.

• Post on your existing social channels. One post per role, with the role description link. Repeat monthly.

• Ask your trustees. Each trustee should be able to name two people who might say yes. That is 10 to 14 candidates from a five to seven person board.

Sample outreach email to your donor list:

Subject: Quick ask: two hours a month, big help

Hi [Name],

We are looking for two volunteers to help with [specific recurring task] for about two hours a [week/month]. Training is short, the work is meaningful, and we will not ghost you. If you have ever thought about getting more involved beyond a donation, this is the kind of thing we mean.

Reply if you are interested or know someone who would be. Full details here: [link to role description].

Thanks for everything you already do,

[Your name]

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Medium-effort: when you have a specific need

• Do-it.life and Reach Volunteering are the UK equivalents for finding specific skills. Do-it is the UK's largest volunteering opportunities database; Reach specialises in skilled and trustee placements and is the charity-sector standard for pro-bono roles. Post the role description verbatim. Your local Volunteer Centre (find yours via NAVCA) is also worth a call.

• Local partnerships: churches, mosques, gurdwaras and other places of worship, neighbourhood associations, and community Facebook groups. A 10-minute conversation with a community leader is often worth more than a paid ad.

• Local noticeboards: Nextdoor UK, parish magazines, library noticeboards, and community Facebook groups.

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High-effort: when you have real capacity

• University volunteering programmes. Many UK universities run Student Volunteering offices or Students' Union volunteering hubs (including via networks such as Student Hubs). They need a partnership agreement, term-time scheduling (autumn term, spring term, summer term), and a staff contact who responds within a day. Worth it for sustained student volunteer pipelines, not for one-off help.

• Corporate volunteering programmes. Many companies offer employer-supported volunteering days. These bring groups of 10 to 50 people on a single day. Well suited to one-time projects (park clean-up, food packing), wrong fit for recurring roles.

For a small charity: exhaust the low-effort channels for a full quarter before touching medium-effort. The people closest to your mission say yes the fastest. Chasing corporate partnerships before you have asked your own donors is a misallocation of the founder's hours.

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Step 7: Plan for the UK legal basics

Getting the legal foundations right protects your volunteers, your beneficiaries, and your trustees.

DBS checks and safeguarding vetting

Volunteers working in "regulated activity" with children or adults at risk need a disclosure and barring check. In England and Wales, that is a DBS check (Disclosure and Barring Service); for roles involving unsupervised contact with children or vulnerable adults, an enhanced DBS check with barred-list check is standard. Scotland uses the PVG scheme (Protecting Vulnerable Groups, administered by Disclosure Scotland). Northern Ireland uses AccessNI. For low-risk roles with adults who are not at risk, a DBS check is usually not required by law, though some funders and insurers may still ask for one.

Safeguarding policy

The Charity Commission for England and Wales treats safeguarding as a core trustee duty. Any charity working with children or adults at risk should have a written safeguarding policy, a named safeguarding lead among the trustees, and a clear route for reporting serious incidents to the Commission. Scotland and Northern Ireland have equivalent requirements under their respective regulators (OSCR; CCNI).

Insurance

Most UK charity insurers bundle employers' liability, public liability, and volunteer cover together. While volunteers are not employees, running an uninsured programme leaves your trustees personally exposed. NCVO is the go-to resource for guidance on appropriate cover; speak to a specialist charity insurer rather than a general broker.

Data protection (UK GDPR)

Volunteer personal data (contact details, DBS references, emergency contacts) is personal data under the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. Your charity needs a lawful basis to hold it, usually legitimate interests or consent, documented clearly. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) publishes guidance on data protection for charities.

The NCVO volunteering knowledge hub is the credible UK reference for volunteer policies, DBS, and safeguarding. Get advice from a UK charity solicitor before finalising volunteer agreements or safeguarding policies for high-risk roles.

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Step 8: Retain volunteers through recognition and growth

Here is the part most retention articles get wrong for a small-org reader. Your number-one retention lever is not a recognition programme. It is not burning out your two reliable volunteers (and yourself) with tool sprawl, undocumented manual work, and last-minute scrambles.

That means:

• Confirm shifts before the day they happen. Reminders should be automatic, not you texting at 9pm.

• Document the task once. A one-page "how to do the Wednesday calls" document means a volunteer can cover for another volunteer without you in the loop.

• Have a backup for every role. If only one person can do a task, that person is one bad week away from your programme collapsing.

• Protect your own bandwidth. The founder who burns out takes the programme down with them. If you cannot give two to three hours a week to coordination, do not run a programme. Run a recurring-task team.

Once the operational basics are stable, the recognition layer matters.

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10 low-cost recognition ideas that small orgs actually run

• 1. Handwritten thank-you card after the first shift and at the six-month mark.

• 2. Public shout-out in your monthly donor newsletter, with permission.

• 3. Volunteer of the quarter, named at your trustees meeting.

• 4. Branded swag (t-shirt, mug, tote bag) at the six-month mark. You can sell branded volunteer merch through a free online shop and give it as recognition without paying per-transaction platform fees.

• 5. A cup of tea with the founder or director, on their calendar, no agenda.

• 6. Letter of reference for volunteers who are job-hunting or applying to school.

• 7. A Volunteers' Week UK appreciation event (1 to 7 June each year). You can host a free volunteer recognition event with Zeffy ticketing for RSVPs, with no per-ticket fees.

• 8. "You did this" impact note: a one-sentence message tying their specific work to a specific outcome ("Your calls this month brought back four lapsed donors").

• 9. Birthday acknowledgements, sent from the same contact list as your donor birthday cards.

• 10. A real role title in their first reference, on LinkedIn, in their bio if they want. Volunteering counts as work. For younger volunteers, your reference letter also supports UCAS applications and Duke of Edinburgh's Award submissions.

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Quarterly check-in template (15 minutes per volunteer)

• 1. What is going well? (3 min)

• 2. What is annoying or unclear? (3 min)

• 3. Is the time commitment still right? (2 min)

• 4. Would you like to take on something new, or stay with the current role? (3 min)

• 5. Anything I (the supervisor) should do differently? (2 min)

• 6. Next check-in date, on the calendar before you end the call. (2 min)

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Signs a volunteer is disengaging

• Shifts get rescheduled or skipped more than once a month.

• Replies to your messages drift from same-day to several days.

• They stop volunteering opinions in check-ins.

• They quietly start saying "this week is bad" three weeks in a row.

If you see two of these, schedule the check-in early. Most disengagement is fixable if you catch it at week three, not month three.

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Volunteer advancement paths

For volunteers who stay six months and want more, name three possible next moves:

• Lead volunteer: coordinates a small group doing the same role, takes over the orientation.

• New role: a different task that uses different skills, with a new role description and a new training.

• Board committee or board: for volunteers with strategic capacity, a path onto a committee or eventually the board of trustees itself.

You do not need a formal programme. You need three options to offer when a reliable volunteer asks "what is next."

For a small charity: the recognition list is the easy part. The hard part is the operational basics above it. If you fix those, the recognition ideas are bonus points. If you do not, no amount of thank-you cards rescues a programme that requires its founder to manually text reminders every week.

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Step 9: Measure success and improve your programme

You do not need a dashboard. You need five numbers, tracked quarterly, with a one-page note on what changed.

Five KPIs that work at small-org scale:

• 1. Active volunteers this quarter (count). How many people showed up at least once.

• 2. Total volunteer hours this quarter (count). Multiplied by a reasonable UK volunteer-hour value (NCVO publishes sector guidance on this) gives your trustees a line for the annual return and Trustees' Annual Report on the value of donated time.

• 3. Task completion rate per recurring role (percentage). Of the planned shifts, what share got done.

• 4. Retention count, six months (count). Of the volunteers who started six months ago, how many are still active. (A count, not a rate. Rates are noisy when your denominator is three.)

• 5. Volunteer satisfaction (one to five score, from a one-question survey at the quarterly check-in). "On a scale of one to five, how is your volunteer experience right now?"

Industry-wide volunteer retention benchmarks are not authoritatively published anywhere worth citing. Skip the benchmark chase. Track your own baseline and improve against it. A 60% six-month retention this year going to 70% next year is a real win. A 60% retention compared to a hypothetical "industry average" tells you nothing actionable.

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Quarterly review template (one page, 30 minutes)

• 1. The five numbers this quarter, with last quarter's numbers next to them.

• 2. One sentence: what worked.

• 3. One sentence: what did not.

• 4. One change you are making next quarter. Just one.

• 5. One ask from the trustees or staff to make the change possible.

That is the whole document. If it is longer than one page, it will not get read.

For a small charity: measure to learn, not to perform. A five-line quarterly note that drives one real change beats a 20-slide deck no one reads. Hand the page to your trustees with the five numbers, and let them ask follow-up questions.

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Common volunteer programme challenges (and how to solve them)

For each, the quick fix is for a tiny team. The full solution is for when you have grown into it.

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Volunteer retention

Quick fix: hold one 15-minute check-in per quarter per volunteer, ask the five questions above, and send one handwritten card at the six-month mark.

Full solution: formal recognition programme with quarterly events, advancement paths, public recognition channels, and a structured exit interview when volunteers leave. See our volunteer recognition and retention strategies for the full playbook.

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Recruitment difficulties for specialised roles

Quick fix: post the role on Do-it.life and Reach Volunteering (both free), and ask your trustees to make two warm introductions each.

Full solution: formal partnerships with university Student Volunteering offices, professional associations, and corporate volunteering programmes for skilled roles.

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Volunteer burnout

Quick fix: cap each volunteer's commitment at the hours in their role description. If they want to do more, that is a new role, not unlimited scope creep on the old one.

Full solution: documented backup volunteers for every key role, rotation schedules, and an explicit "take a quarter off" option built into every recurring role.

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Inconsistent communication

Quick fix: use the same tool to message volunteers that you use to message donors. You can email your volunteer cohort the same way you email donors for free, which avoids paying for a separate mass-email tool while your contact count is still small.

Full solution: documented communication cadence (monthly newsletter, weekly shift reminder, quarterly check-in), with templates for each.

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Volunteer management tools: when to use software

Honest stack framing, by programme size:

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0 to 10 volunteers, one or two recurring tasks

Spreadsheets and your existing contact list are enough. Do not buy software. The cost of learning the tool exceeds the time you would save. Put volunteers in your contact list, tag them as volunteers, and send shift reminders via email or text from your existing tools.

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10 or more volunteers, or any shift-based work

Add one dedicated free scheduling tool for shifts and rotas. SignUpGenius has a genuinely free tier built for smaller charities and is a straightforward recommendation for scheduling capability that Zeffy does not provide. It handles shift sign-ups, swaps, reminders, and hour tracking. Pick the tool whose interface your volunteers prefer on a phone.

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The contact, comms, events, and merch layer underneath

More than 100,000 charities and nonprofits use Zeffy to keep volunteers and donors in one free contact list, send the same newsletter to both, and host recognition events without paying ticket fees. Zeffy has raised over £2 billion for organisations since launch. The platform is completely free: no platform fee, no transaction fee, no credit card fee. Ever. That means:

• One contact list with tags for "volunteer," "donor," and the overlap, with saved segments for "volunteers who also donated this quarter."

• Mass email and newsletters to your volunteer cohort from the same dashboard you message donors from.

• Free event ticketing for recognition events: Volunteers' Week UK dinners, year-end appreciation nights, with RSVPs and scannable tickets.

• A free online shop for branded merch, with inventory and variants.

• If you want a formal "Volunteer Club" tier with ID cards and renewal reminders, free membership programmes can do that too.

What Zeffy does not have: shift scheduling, rota or shift swaps, volunteer hour tracking, role-matching algorithms, or volunteer self-service portals. Pair Zeffy with SignUpGenius for the scheduling piece.

For a small charity: use spreadsheets until the spreadsheet visibly breaks (you miss a shift, you double-book someone, you forget who has been thanked). When it breaks, add the free scheduler. Add Zeffy when you realise you are maintaining a donor list and a volunteer list as two separate things. Do not buy paid software for any of this.

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Frequently asked questions

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