A common standard for collecting volunteering data backed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has been published.
Volunteering opportunities are currently advertised across more than 47 brokerage platforms, with information collected in various ways.
This means volunteers have to navigate multiple websites, while organisations are required to enter the same information repeatedly across different systems.
The DCMS-funded project, conducted by the Open Data Institute (ODI), Do IT and Team Kinetic, has aimed to address this by producing a common data collection standard.
Published today, the standard covers volunteering roles, locations, suitability, and application details – so information can be published once and reused widely.
Civil society minister Stephanie Peacock said: “Volunteering changes lives, both for the people who give their time and for the communities that depend on them.
“This project has built the foundations to make it easier for people across the UK to find ways to help, and for the organisations that need them to be found.”
Organisations adopt standard
The project was first announced in October last year and ran three pilot projects to test how the standard would be applied.
As part of this, the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO) confirmed that its Milo volunteering platform, used widely in the country, is implementing the standard.
The Royal Voluntary Service has also agreed to use the standard to publish data about volunteering opportunities from its recently launched platform, GoVo.
Do IT’s technical team has also built a ChatGPT application that allows people to find volunteering opportunities and refine their search via natural-language conversation, using standardised opportunity data.
A series of interviews with smaller organisations was also conducted as part of the project, finding that measuring the impact of volunteering activity had become so difficult that many organisations had stopped trying.
The ODI said these findings will inform guidance and support developed as the standard is adopted more widely.
ODI chief executive Louise Burke said: “Volunteering is one of the most powerful expressions of community we have, but the data infrastructure that supports it has lagged far behind.
“This project has shown that a shared, open approach to volunteering data is not only technically achievable but genuinely wanted by the sector.
“The data standard we have developed, and the tools it enables, demonstrate what can be built when organisations work together on common foundations.
“The ODI is committed to stewarding this work, and we look forward to seeing it taken up across the sector.”
Calum MacÙisdean, SCVO's digital services manager, said of the organisation's involvement in the project: “Making it as easy as possible for people to find volunteer opportunities is incredibly important.
“It’s been exciting to be involved in building an open data standard to achieve that, and also for SCVO to be one of the first organisations in the UK to publish data using the standard at scale.
“Working collaboratively with ODI, building on SCVO’s existing Milo data structure and SCVO-developed systems for Volunteer Scotland and TSI Network Scotland (representing Scotland’s Third Sector Interfaces), we’ve developed a system that allows information about volunteering opportunities already in the public domain to be shared in a standardised way using a structured semantic format and schema.
“We are glad to share information and collaborate with ODI to make it easier for everyone to build systems in future that are compatible with each other.”
