Volunteering plays a quiet but essential role in communities across the UK. Every day, people give their time to support neighbours, respond in moments of need, and help organisations deliver services that would otherwise struggle to exist. In fact, over half the adult population contributes to their community in some way each year, according to the Community Life Survey. Yet for all this activity, the way information about volunteering opportunities is shared has not kept pace with how people expect digital services to behave. Increasingly, we assume we should be able to find, book or buy at the touch of a button.
Over recent months, the Open Data Institute has been working with partners across the volunteering system to explore whether that gap can be narrowed. The alpha phase of the work, commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and delivered by the ODI alongside Do IT and Team Kinetic, focused on a practical question - could a shared, open approach to volunteering data make it easier for people and organisations to find each other?
What the alpha phase helped clarify
The alpha phase was designed to test ideas, not deliver a complete answer. Rather than starting with technology, the work focused on learning from those closest to volunteering - people who volunteer themselves, organisations that depend on them, and the platforms that help match people to opportunities. To help guide the project, a Steering Group was established with members from across the sector.
Learning took place through a mix of structured collaboration and open experimentation. Alongside regular sessions with a separate (and open) Standards Working Group, the project included a sector-wide hackathon that brought together volunteers, community organisations, platform providers and technologists to work with the draft standard in practice. Together, these activities helped to surface shared challenges and test early assumptions.
From the outset, we were interested in understanding whether a shared approach could genuinely help people who want to volunteer, and the organisations that would value their time and skills. The alpha gave us space to listen carefully, test ideas openly, and learn where things felt useful and where they didn’t. That combination of working groups and hands-on experimentation helped ground the work in real experiences from the sector.
ODI Project Lead
Through this process, the project confirmed that information about volunteering opportunities is often harder to find, share and reuse than it needs to be. Opportunities are described in different ways, published in different places, and maintained separately, creating friction for both volunteers and organisations.
The project explored whether a shared way of describing volunteering opportunities could help reduce this friction. A draft open standard was developed and tested with contributors from across the sector, supported by a working example of how opportunity information could be shared consistently between systems.
Importantly, this work did not happen behind closed doors. The Standards Working Group provided ongoing challenges and practical insight, while the hackathon offered a chance to see how the draft approach would work in practice when people tried to use it to solve real problems. Together, these activities help ensure the work responds to the needs and challenges of the volunteering ecosystem.
Why this matters for people and communities
Although much of the alpha phase involved careful design and testing, its significance lay in what it could lead to. It’s likely that when opportunities are easier to find and understand, people are more likely to follow through with a volunteering application. When organisations can share information once and reuse it across services, they can spend less time managing listings and more time supporting volunteers.
For many charities, whatever their size, finding volunteers is a challenge. Writing compelling descriptions of opportunities and keeping information up to date on multiple different sites takes a lot of resource. Anything that reduces that burden means more time to welcome and support people once they come forward.
Convenor of Shaping the Future with Volunteering
Over time, this could make volunteering more inclusive and responsive. Clearer information can help people judge whether their circumstances fit an opportunity. Better data sharing can help organisations reach beyond their usual networks. Taken together, these small changes could make a meaningful difference to participation and retention.
The alpha phase also demonstrated the value of collaboration. Bringing people together who do not usually work side by side, through both sustained working groups and a short, focused hackathon, helped build shared understanding and trust, reinforcing the sense that this is a collective challenge rather than a problem for any single organisation to solve.
What comes next - testing the difference this could make
The alpha phase showed that a shared approach to volunteering data is possible. The beta phase, which started this month, will focus on understanding whether it is useful in practice. This stage of the project will concentrate on a small number of real-world pilots, designed to reflect everyday volunteering scenarios. Through these, the team will test whether shared data can make things simpler for people who want to volunteer and organisations looking for support.
Pilot 1 - Making opportunities easier to find at a national scale
This pilot focuses on implementing the standard with several system providers to test its usability and enable interoperability between systems and platforms. It will explore how volunteering opportunities from many different organisations can be brought together and made discoverable in one place, without each organisation having to manage multiple listings.
For volunteers, instead of searching across several websites or creating new accounts on different platforms, opportunities could appear where people already look, presented in a consistent and understandable way.
For organisations, publishing an opportunity once and making it visible across multiple services could reduce duplication and free up time currently spent on administration. It also has the potential to reach more people, particularly for organisations that struggle to attract volunteers beyond their immediate networks. Involvement in large-scale engagement campaigns, for example, the Big Help Out Weekend, will further extend their reach.
Pilot 2 - Supporting smaller organisations to take part
Another pilot, in collaboration with Team Kinetic, will focus on smaller, grassroots organisations and groups that rely heavily on volunteers but often lack the time or confidence to engage with complex digital systems.
For volunteers, this work could bring local opportunities into view that are currently shared informally (or not at all). Many community roles never reach wider audiences simply because the organisations offering them do not have easy ways to publish information online.
For organisations, the pilot will test whether simple guidance and lightweight support are enough to help them share opportunities more widely, without adding to their workload. The aim is to ensure that a shared approach to data works for organisations of all sizes, not just those with specialist digital capacity.
Pilot 3 - Preparing for how people will search in future
A third pilot, in collaboration with Do IT will look ahead to how people are increasingly finding information, including through conversational tools and digital assistants. This work asks whether volunteering opportunities are described clearly and consistently enough to be understood as search habits change, and AI becomes more prevalent.
For volunteers, clearer information can mean fewer dead ends and misunderstandings, particularly around availability, location or suitability. For organisations, it helps ensure that the way opportunities are described today will still make sense tomorrow, without requiring constant reinvention.
Learning by doing
Across all three pilots, the emphasis in the beta phase is on learning through use. What works well will be carried forward. Where things fall short, the standard will be refined in response. Volunteers, organisations and platform providers will continue to shape the work through shared learning and participation.
What’s been key so far is the eagerness to test ideas openly and adjust them based on feedback from across the breadth of the volunteering system. That gives us confidence that this next phase will be shaped by real use.
DCMS and Steering Group Chair
If the alpha was about testing whether a shared approach could work, the beta is about understanding what difference it could make in everyday volunteering. We’ll continue to share updates as the work progresses and reaches its conclusion towards the end of March 2026.
If you’d like to keep up to date with the project and find out how to get involved, please email [email protected].
