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 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 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 2000 UCL 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, Instagram and Twitter.
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.
Social Hackathons
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.
Co-designing New Roles
We also offer a chance for our partners to meet UCL students to co-design new volunteer roles that relate to their academic work. These Building Bridges events take place once a year in the summer.
Doorway into UCL
More generally, we see ourselves as a doorway into UCL for our partners. If you would like to connect with another part of the 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 regular meetings with our partners during term-time 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 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.