A conversation with staff from The Auckland Project led to the kernel of an idea. In some organisations, the management and supervision of volunteers are roles that are distributed across staff in an organisation. A 'volunteer manager' or 'head of volunteering' will be responsible for administering the overall volunteering programme and lead on the strategic development of that programme. Meanwhile, team leads (e.g. curators, education officers or head gardeners) might find themselves directly supervising volunteers on a daily basis. Senior managers might never directly work with volunteers but will make decisions that affect the volunteer experience. But staff in those different roles don't necessarily share a common understanding of why or how volunteers should be involved in their organisation. Does the presence or absence of common values make a difference to the volunteers' experiences? Does it affect the successful running of the organisation.

Along with Rebecca Prescott (Northumbria University) and Ziyun Fan (University of York), Bruce has been developing a funding application for a research project around these questions.

As part of that, Bruce and Rebecca trialled some research methods with staff at The Auckland Project to see if the methods worked the way that we thought/hoped they would. The results of the trial can be found in the report below.