Future of Volunteering - mid project update

On Friday last week, I had the pleasure of hosting Dave Snowden at Deloitte in Sydney to give a mid project update on the Future of Volunteering project. It was interesting to see an independant report on the session by Brad Hinton in his blog "Plain Speaking". I will let you read his report on the session as it effectively sums up the proceedings.

One thing I will say is that whilst we do have an unbalanced survey set - the majority from the 17 - 59 yr age group (little from the under 17 age group, some from the over 60 and manager of volunteers groups) already some of the insights are beginning to challenge traditionally held assumptions about volunteers - for example, we are seeing a significant number of the stories being told by people who work full time, are degree educated, volunteer weekly and volunteer because it is their passion.

We are currently working on strategies to redress this imbalance and get more stories from the under represented groups with tweaks to the survey language and a phone-in to a call centre being held on 31 Jan - 2 Feb (more details early next year). We also will have a release of the Sensemaker package in January that will allow us to get stories through Facebook - an exciting development and one which will hopefully extend the reach of this project.