Have you ever wanted to give something back to your community by volunteering but didn’t know where to start? Or have you always thought that you don’t have the time, qualifications, or expertise required to actually be of help?

The truth is everyone has the ability to make a positive contribution to their community through volunteering. While volunteers who give up their time to head to foreign countries in need are quite rightly celebrated, there are also plenty of valuable and worthwhile projects closer to home that need your help too which you can contribute to at a time and place that suits you.

So to help you get started join our live webTV show where Andrea Rannard from Volunteering England will you give the lowdown on who could benefit from your help and how you can get involved. She’ll be joined by Helen Davies from Orange, who will be talking about how technology can help make volunteering easier.

Andrea Rannard from Volunteering England and Helen Davies from Orange join us live online at www.studiotalk.tv on Thursday 31st March at 2:30pm to offer the best advice to anxious mums and dads.

Click here to submit questions before the show: http://studiotalk.tv/show/interested-in-volunteering-but-not-sure-where-to-start

For more information visit www.orange.co.uk/dosomegood

H: Liz Speight

A: Andrea Rannard – Volunteering England

B: Helen Davies - Orange

H: Whatever your take on the big society, one thing is for certain. We could probably all find five minutes to volunteer our time to the local community.

Credits

H: Hello and welcome to Make a Difference, I’m Liz Speight. Have you ever wanted to give something back to your community by volunteering, but don’t quite know where to start? Or have you been worried that you don’t have the time, qualifications or expertise required to actually be of use. Well the truth is that everyone has the ability to make a positive contribution to their community, and joining me today to discuss this in detail is Andrea Rannard from Volunteering England, and from a company behind a brand new volunteering app, set to make volunteering that little bit easier, Helen Davies from Orange. Welcome along to you both, really nice to see you today.

Coming up on the show today, we discuss volunteering and the sorts of activities you could get involved with, a revolutionary new mobile phone volunteering app, and of course we will tackle all of your questions here live. And if you do want to get your questions to Andrea and Helen, please use the box on your screen, click send and we’ll do our best to tackle them. Also if you’re tweeting today, please use #studiotalkTV.

Right, let’s talk a little bit first about volunteering, there’s been quite a lot in the news about it, hasn’t there, with the Big Society, the government talking about it, trying to encourage more people to get involved with volunteering. Andrea, how easy is it to get involved these days with volunteering? People are so busy, aren’t they?

A: People are busy and there are a lot of provisions out there to help more people volunteer, such as volunteer centres out in the community, which are one stop shops – they can go in and find out about volunteering opportunities. There are resources online, websites such as Do It, you can put your details in and find out opportunities, so there different things out there that can help people to develop skills, build up self esteem, help people to meet new friends and really get involved with their interests and causes that they care about. But what is really exciting is with the Do Some Good mobile phone volunteering application it makes it even more easy to volunteer, so people can do it through a phone and take 5 minutes and make a difference, and do it at a time that really is convenient to them and fit around their lifestyle.

H: So you’ve got the five minute app, but people tend to think that it’s only retired people that volunteer, don’t they? I mean, in your field of work you must see a lot of ranges of volunteering. It’s not just old ladies helping in Oxfam is it? Give me an idea of the sort of volunteering you might be able to get involved in.

A: Well, people volunteer at all different ages. Personally, I started volunteering when I was 11 and I carried on volunteering, through school, through university and as a professional. And different things that you can do - you can be trustees of a charity, or a governor of a school, so you can look at quite strategic, management focused volunteering positions. You can do remote volunteering, so you can volunteer via the internet and get involved in campaigns or petitions. You can do one-off volunteering where you can get involved with an environmental volunteering opportunity in your community. And you can get involved in festivals, volunteering at festivals. So what we see, because there’s so many diverse opportunities out there, that there’s something there for everyone, whether you’re 16 or 106. There really is something there for everyone.

H: So maybe not if you’re 106, but if you’re 16 it’s quite good for your CV isn’t it, to be seen to be volunteering.

A: Absolutely. What we know is that volunteering helps people to develop soft and hard skills, so soft skills such as leadership, teamwork, time management skills, skills that recruiters really, really value

H: And people skills. So if you don’t have much to do with old people you could go into an old people’s home. They’re all valuable skills these, aren’t they?

A: They are, they are. So some people are focused on they want to develop CV’s, they want to get into a profession, so for example, people might volunteer on hospital radio and it helps them break into journalism which is an extremely competitive field. Other people might want to volunteer just to make new friends. Perhaps they’ve gone away to university, perhaps they’ve moved into a new community, and they just want to find out about where they live, meet new people, build up social contacts. There’s so many opportunities, and there’s also evidence that volunteering enhances your health, your mental health, your physical health, so there are great…there’s research out there and also, there’s research that it enhances your love life as well, which is not a bad thing! Often people through volunteering might meet their future partner. So there are so many benefits to volunteering.

H: And it’s not like work. People have a very busy week, don’t they and you get to the weekend and you think, oh I’m going to have to go and do this…but it’s not like work because it could be a completely different field couldn’t it?

A: Absolutely. It can be a real sense of escapism to go and do something completely different to what you do during your working week. And also, you can volunteer overseas and get to meet remote communities, find out about different cultures, improve your language skills, so there’s so much out there it’s incredible.

H: Yes, you just need to know where to start which is where this app comes in. Helen, you’re from Orange and there’s this new app, which means that people can just donate 5 minutes of their time and really make a difference. Now that sounds really interesting, tell us a little bit, give us an overview of how it really works

B: Well, Do Some Good is a free app that enables people to do bite-size actions on their mobile in less than 5 minutes, to make a difference to charities and causes that they really care about. So it means that people can volunteer at a time and a place that suits them. So it doesn’t matter whether you’re at the bus stop, or whether you’re on the train on the way into work, or whether you’re just waiting for the kettle to boil. You can give a few minutes of your time to really make a difference. And I think for us what’s really exciting is that we can use the power of mobile technology to really transform the way that people give their time to charities and causes that they care about.

H: So how does it actually work then? You’ve got 5 minutes of your time, you’ve downloaded the app. For a start, how do you download then? Go onto the computer and do it?

B: Yep, really straight forward. You can either go to our website and download the app from there, or you can go straight to the Apple app store and download the app. It takes a few minutes, once you’ve got the app on your phone, there are 12 charity volunteering actions that we’re launching with the app, we’ll be adding more actions as the year progresses, but there are 12 actions on there now, there’s a real variety of things that you can get involved in, but every one of these actions is a task that takes less than 5 minutes to complete. So it could be that if you like doing surveys, you might want to help the Samaritans map the mood of the nation and take part in their Wellbeing survey, and that will really enable Samaritans to understand and really reach out and help people that need it.

H: OK. So is it just iPhones that are taking this app at the moment?

B: It is. The app is available to download on the iPhone right now. We’ve got a big plan of activity during the rest of this year, where we’ll be adding more actions to the app, but we’ll also be making sure that the app is available on other mobile devices over the coming months.

H: That’s good. So we’ve heard about The Samaritans, but what kind of other things that you can get involved with, then? Practical Actions is another one I understand.

B: Practical Actions is a great action, because if you have language skills, you can help Practical Action by translating bite-sized chunks of their how-to guides. Now these guides are being used by people on the ground in developing countries to really help local communities help themselves out of poverty, so things like helping them to build sustainable houses, or grow more crops really is making a difference at a very grass roots level

H: And how much of a difference can it make?

B: Well, the potential is huge. If one million people just gave 5 minutes of their time that would be equal to a decade of volunteering

H: Wow, that’s amazing! We all have mobiles these days, don’t we? And we all have 5 minutes, if you’re commuting or whatever

B: Exactly. And that’s what we would really love to see is that people incorporate mobile volunteering into part of their everyday routine and life and as we said, it could be when you’re on the train going into work, or boiling the kettle, or waiting for a friend in a bar who’s late, so…

H: Yes. So why do Orange get involved in this sort of thing?

B: We’re passionate about volunteering. We’ve been involved in real life volunteering through our Orange Rock Corps programme for almost 4 years now and we wanted to look for ways in how we could use our technology to really engage more people in volunteering, and that’s how we came up with this idea for mobile volunteering. Wouldn’t it be brilliant to encourage people to volunteer on the go. We know that time is one of the biggest barriers for people getting involved in volunteering, so being able to do it at a time that suits you is really valuable.

H: And how easy is it to use for a technophobe like myself? How easy is it?

B: It’s so simple. Everybody uses a mobile phone now. The stuff that you’re doing on the volunteering app is you’re taking photos, you’re using texts, you’re taking part in a survey, it’s using the features of your mobile phone that you would ordinarily use on a day to day basis

H: So how do you actually get involved then? How do you download the app? Where do you start with it?

B: Well you start by going to our website, which is orange.co.uk/dosomegood and from there you can find out everything there is to know about mobile volunteering and you can download the app, you can go straight to the Apple store, we’d love you to go to the website first and find out what mobile volunteering is really about. And on that website we’ll be doing other stuff as well so we really want to be able to show people the impact of their volunteering, so we’ll have lots of stories up on that website where we’re talking about what’s been the impact of people translating paragraphs of text for how-to guides, we will want to show how many guides have been translated, how many countries are now using these guides and how many local communities have benefitted as a result

H: And Andrea, do you think this is really going to make a difference? Do you think it might hook people into volunteering that might not have done so before?

A: I absolutely think so, yes. I think it’s a really great entry point for a lot of people who have never considered volunteering before. They can just go on, download the application and get involved and look at the diversity of opportunities that are out there for them. And I think that will also encourage people to look at volunteering in the community, more traditional forms of volunteering, because they’ve seen what they can do through a phone and they’ll also be able to find out what they can do when they physically go out to a community as well. So I think it’s got so much potential to mobilise lots of people who’ve never considered volunteering, and also for those people who currently do volunteer, it’s another way that they can give to the community in a different way. I think it’s a really great opportunity

H: Everyone’s a winner. We hear a lot about the Big Society – it’s a big buzzword with the government isn’t it? Do you think that this is something that the government would like?

B: We know it’s something that the government would like, we have a letter from David Cameron himself to say that he’s delighted, we’ve created this mobile volunteering app that will allow us to engage, hopefully, millions of people in volunteering on the go

H: If the Prime Minster likes it, it can’t be bad, can it?

We’re talking about mobile volunteering. Stick with us because we’re going to be answering all your questions here live

Break

H: Well, if you’ve just logged on to Make A Difference, I’m Liz Speight and today we’re going to be talking about a new app, launched by Orange which hopes to make the process of volunteering just a small amount of your time, a little bit easier. Let’s move on to some of your questions now because we’ve had a quite a few in. A question in from Steven, he says; I live in South West London and want to try to see if there’s somewhere locally that I can help out with honey bees. Sounds interesting. So would the app help him out with that?

B: The app won’t help, but our website orange.co.uk/dosomegood will encourage people to find out about mobile volunteering, but also we are signposting people to real life volunteering opportunities as well, so there’s information on there if people want to get involved in real life volunteering in their local areas we’ve got links through to Volunteering UK, so people can find out that way

H: So it’s a really good one stop shop, really. A good place to start. OK Steven, well good luck with that. Rather you than me, I don’t fancy getting stung but there we are. At least you get honey at the end of it, don’t you? Another question here from Lucy, she says; I love volunteering Andrea. Do you think I can use volunteering to help me get into charity work? So I assume she means paid charity work. That’s quite a popular area isn’t it for people? I suppose you the more experience you can get for it, the better

A: I know first hand that it’s absolutely essential to get some volunteer experience in order to get into the voluntary sector, because that is one of the key things. If you can show in your free time that you’re passionate about volunteering and the voluntary sector and the key causes, that’s some of the attributes charities look for when they recruit. So a key thing maybe to do, is to look at different websites. Maybe prospects.ac.uk which gives you different profiles for careers and how you get into certain careers and there’s actually a profile on there called charity worker, so you can take a look and see how people in that sector got into that sector, so it’s a really good resource but absolutely if you do want to work with a charity, really do get some volunteering experience

H: And what was that website again?

A: It’s prospects.ac.uk

H: Good tip. You heard it from the horse’s mouth there, somebody who is actually working in the charity sector. Another question in from Lara from Bushey, she says; I want to get involved in volunteering, but I’m unsure about how to choose what to do. Can you help with telling me which sort would be best if I want to work at a care home? Do you need to get CRB checked and t hat sort of thing?

A: For a care home, if you’re in contact with vulnerable adults, you would need a CRB check, so that would be absolutely something to consider. What I would suggest is look at different websites, maybe different care homes and look at vacancies that they offer. Find out what sort of volunteering they think is valuable to work in that career, but essentially, to work in care homes it’s about team work, it’s about being able to have strong communication skills, good time management as well, and all of those skills you can really get with volunteering.

H: So if you wanted to volunteer in a care home it’s maybe not as easy as all that, but you might be able to work in something else, it would give you the skills and you can then go on and work in a care home?

A: Well, you can volunteer in some care homes, but if you’re looking for paid positions in care homes as well, then volunteer experience is really useful too.

H: On the subject of CRB checks, how do you go about getting a CRB check? Say you want to work in a school or with Scouts or something like that?

A: The best way to do this is through the organisation that you volunteer with. They will support you with the paperwork and the process

H: OK. I hope that’s of some help to you. Another question in from Sarah in Bristol; I work at a local charity, how can I get my charity involved and on the app? That’s a good question, Helen?

B: Great question! Well, I think we mentioned that we’ve launched the app today with 12 charity actions and will be adding more actions throughout the course of this year. On our do some good website, there’s a page there where if you’ve got a fantastic charity idea for mobile volunteering you can submit your idea, we’ll be checking those every week to pick out the best of those and take them forward, so please go to the website and add your idea

H: Well best of luck with that. And final question, I think, from Steve; how often will you be updating the app with new volunteering ideas?

B: We’ll be updating the app every couple of months, we’ll be adding a few more actions, so we want to keep it really fresh and exciting and interesting for people and ensure that people have got a variety of volunteering activities that they can get involved in, so yeah, every couple of months

H: OK and final question, final final, Kate from London; I love the idea of being able to volunteer really easily. Is it only smart phones or can I get it on my Blackberry? We’ve kind of covered that, but Helen just reiterate?

B: So the app right now is available to iPhone users, but we’re working hard to extend that so that it will be available to other mobile devices, including Blackberrys, so later this year you’ll be able to use the volunteering app on your Blackberry

H: OK, so watch this space. Well, we’ve run out of time I’m afraid ladies, so Helen and Andrea, thanks so much for coming in and talking about it, it’s really, really interesting and if you’d like any more information on the new mobile volunteering app, which is orange.co.uk/dosomegood. So why don’t you do some good, and get involved. Thanks for watching. Bye bye.