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Registration

We curate our list of partners (c.350), only signing up UK-based not-for-profit organisations that offer good quality volunteer roles to UCL students. We ask you to visit our info for recruiters page for our full terms and conditions and check if you are happy with our recruiter service standards (which you’ll need to sign during registration).

Once we have decided if we can work together you’ll be invited to meet with our Partnerships Manager and given a login to our online platform which enables you to post volunteer roles, track enquiries and manage your UCL volunteers. You'll also be signed up to our Partners Mailing List where we'll send you occasional emails (1-2 per month on average) with relevant updates and opportunities, including everything cited below.

Promoting Opportunities

When you post your roles on our directory, they appear on our Opportunity Finder. The directory shows the most recent roles at the top, so if you want to get more volunteers, you can simply republish your opportunities to give them extra prominence.

Students can also view the directory as a map, so you should put postcodes on your roles. Remember to add what skills students might gain and accurately tag the categories for each role.

Volunteering Fairs

All our partners are invited to apply for a stall at our Volunteering Fairs. These are held in-person in October, November and January each year. They are a chance to meet students face-to-face on campus and enthuse them about volunteering with your organisation.

Weekly Newsletter and Social Media

Over a thousand students open our weekly newsletter, which consists of a round-up of the latest vacancies and other volunteering news. If you would like us to give your opportunities an extra push, you can ask us to showcase it within the newsletter.

We also feature opportunities and events on our social media too - check us out on Facebook and Instagram.

Newsfeed

Another way for you to promote your opportunities is to feature on the Volunteering Service’s newsfeed.  If one of your UCL student volunteers would like to write about their experiences at your organisation – or if you would like to write something about your UCL volunteers – get in touch! Stories also get featured in the newsletter and on our social media to give them some extra attention.

Targeted Comms

We do a lot of work asking other people at UCL to spread the word about volunteer roles. For example, if a role has a relevance for students from a particular academic discipline, we will send it to the department. If there is a link to a student club or society, we will send it to them. We meet weekly to review all new opportunities that have come through and been approved on our directory to discuss where else we can share them in UCL.

One-off Volunteering Events

We promote one-off volunteering events – these prove popular with students who cannot make a regular commitment. We advertise them both on our Opportunity Finder and the Students’ Union’s online events calendar. The Volunteering Service will pay travel expenses for UCL students at one-off events, so you don’t have to.

Challenge-based Volunteering

We run Social Hackathons, where a team of students work on a business problem or issue set by a partner over the course of a day. These take place in-person and online and there's £500 available for partners who've successfully applied to host to enact the solutions our students have come up with. We run 3-4 of these days in the November and again in the February Reading Weeks each year and all our partners are invited to apply to host.

We also run our Consultancy Challenge every June. The Consultancy Challenge is a week-long volunteering initiative that builds on our Social Hackathon model. It is open to all current UCL students and ran in collaboration between staff in Students' Union UCL, UCL Careers and staff in our community partner organisations who've agreed to host.

Doorway into Students' Union UCL and UCL

More generally, we see ourselves as a doorway into Students' Union UCL and UCL for our current community partners. If you would like to connect with another part of the Students' Union or university, then we will do what we can to help.

Supporting Our Students

We are not just a signposting service – we support UCL students throughout their volunteering journey. We will be in touch whilst they are volunteering to see how they are getting on, and to offer access to training and other events.

Volunteering Awards

Each year we hold our big celebration, the Volunteering Awards, where we recognise and celebrate the hard work and effort from countless UCL volunteers, partner organisations, student-led projects, and more.

There are specialist awards, including one for Volunteering Organisation of the Year that we’ll encourage your UCL volunteers to nominate you for, and another for Volunteer of the Year for you to nominate your stand-out UCL volunteers.

Partners’ Meetings

We hold in-person meetings with our partners during Terms Two and Three each year to give updates about our service, pass on the results of research we have conducted into student volunteering, and to give you a chance to provide feedback to us.

These events are a great opportunity for our new and existing community partners to find out more about what we do, how we can work effectively together and provide an informal forum for networking.

Our Wider Service

In addition to our Partnerships Team, the Volunteering Service also supports Student-led Volunteering and the Community Research Initiative. These offer further opportunities to work with UCL students.