Royal Voluntary Service opens platform to promote all charity volunteering roles
Howard Lake | 18 June 2025 | News
Royal Voluntary Service’s new volunteering platform is now open for charities to register to upload their volunteering roles.
All charities across Britain, whether large or small, can now use RVS’ platform to promote their volunteering opportunities. Both platform and its associated identity checking service are entirely free for charities to access.
The platform, announced in March, has been made possible by funds raised by the players of People’s Postcode Lottery.
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It has been improved and refined by numerous charities, following workshops and user testing. Future developments after launch will include free criminal record checking and integrating with existing volunteer management systems.
Charities will begin to be invited to upload roles to test the platform from this month onwards, ahead of the public launch in the autumn, when potential volunteers will be able to browse, search, filter, click and connect with causes and charities they care about.
Royal Voluntary Service hopes that the sector’s involvement will help make the platform “a hub of flexible, accessible digitally-enabled volunteering”, in order to strengthen civil society at a time when formal volunteering is in decline yet demand is increasing.
The platform will also be used to match businesses with suitable employee volunteering opportunities, to optimise their corporate volunteering and social impact activities. This could see the 140 million gifted hours of corporate volunteering that currently go unused, being fulfilled to the advantage of charities, causes and communities across Britain.
Catherine Johnstone CBE, Chief Executive of Royal Voluntary Service said:
“I know many in the sector will agree that it’s time we did things a little differently when it comes to volunteering and volunteer recruitment. It needs to be more accessible and more inclusive. The new platform will help to address what we know to be barriers to active citizenship and will enable volunteering to fit readilyinto modern lives so that we can empower more people to give their time and to click and connect to the causes they care about. Working with others, we want to create something to support the public, sector and businesses to transact volunteering. We are passionate about ensuring as many charities, causes and support organisations are a part of it as possible”.
Clara Govier, Managing Director at People’s Postcode Lottery, added:
“It’s inspiring for us to think that our players are supporting something that could create a step-change in volunteering in Great Britain. We work with a range of amazing charities and are eager to see how they harness the power of the platform to recruit and mobilise more volunteers in support of their incredible work.”
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.