Fiona Burton, Volunteers Manager at York Museums Trust will be answering your questions on Working with Volunteers on Friday 18 September between 11am to noon BST.

Fiona Burton is the Volunteers Manager at York Museums Trust, tasked with starting the volunteers programme in 2007, on a part-time basis with just 14 volunteers, and now heading up a team of 3 who train and support c350 active volunteers across all of the Trust’s sites.

York Museums Trust is in the very fortunate position of having a dedicated team to manage and support its large volunteer population. We do not have what is often considered to be the ‘usual’ demographic for museum volunteers.

York being such a popular university city, over half of our volunteers are aged 25 or under, and many of these are students. This naturally means that we have a fairly high turnover, with students often staying with us for only 1 academic year.

Since 2007 we have worked with over 1800 volunteers who have come to us for a variety of reasons, and who have worked with us on a variety of projects. The majority of our volunteers are in a visitor facing role, delivering collections based activities to visitors to our sites.

These roles have a sizeable training programme attached to them, so it’s a considerable undertaking for a volunteer to get involved, and it takes considerable managing from the volunteers’ team.

We believe that volunteering should be a shared experience. It should be rewarding and of benefit to the volunteer in building skills, confidence and extending social networks, whilst also benefitting the organisation by assisting in the delivery of its strategic objectives.

For many volunteers, it is a taste of perhaps a future career, a chance to build their CV, to increase their knowledge, or indulge a passion. For others, it is a regular social date in their diary, a feeling of being useful, of contributing something.

For York Museums Trust, the volunteer programme is fundamentally about increasing access to our collections, and in this respect, our volunteers are as much our target audience as our visitors. We are able to provide access to the knowledge, skills and expertise that we have in-house, as well as the collections themselves.

In return, our visitors enjoy an enhanced experience when they are able to handle real collection objects, and learn something about those objects and the stories that they have to tell. Our volunteers delivered almost 1800 collections based activities to our visitors in the last year.

If you consider that the average activity will attract maybe 70 visitors during term time, but 300 visitors in the busy holiday period, that’s a lot of visitors enjoying an extra experience that they wouldn’t have had if the volunteers had not been there. The broader range of the work of the Trust is also greatly enhanced by volunteer input into things such as research or collections management for example.

There are some similarities between managing paid staff and volunteers, but there are also some significant differences. Language is so important, not just what you say, but how you say it. Structure and organisation are important too.

There is a balance to be struck between discarding all unnecessary bureaucracy and having a clear and meaningful structure in place. Volunteers need to know what is expected of them, and how the organisation will help them to achieve that.

Sometimes, personalities need to be managed with more tact and consideration than you would afford to employees. Although this can be tricky, it’s one of the aspects that I find particularly rewarding when you have a good outcome for both volunteer and organisation.

Good communication is really important. Volunteers need to know that their input is meaningful and appreciated. We all need to feel valued, and if feedback is the only way we are ‘reimbursed’ for our efforts, then it’s all the more important that we do this regularly and genuinely.

Volunteers are such a fabulous additional resource in our organisation, we strive to ensure that everyone in the Trust understands and values the contribution that volunteers make and that all our volunteers have a rewarding and enjoyable experience with us.

Fiona Burton

 

Fiona Burton, Volunteers Manager at York Museums Trust will be answering your questions on Working with Volunteers on Friday 18 September between 11am to noon BST.

You can post questions before the Q & A session, on 18 September , or you can converse in real time with our expert. You can use the comment box below to post a question, or you can use twitter with the hashtag  #mdyask.

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If you have a problem submitting questions, either in the comment box, or via twitter, please email your questions to gillian.waters@ymt.org.uk

If you have ideas for subjects you’d like to see us cover in future, or would like to take questions yourself, please get in contact with us and let us know.