New code of practice for volunteer fundraising
Howard Lake | 12 January 2005 | News
The Institute of Fundraising has published its first best practice code for volunteer fundraising.
The Volunteer Fundraising Code, the 22nd developed by the Institute of Fundraising, has been published at the start of the UK’s Year of the Volunteer to help organisations manage the 16 million volunteers that fundraise for voluntary organisations.
It offers guidelines for organisations working with volunteer fundraisers, and differentiates between volunteers that are acting ‘on behalf of’ an organisation (where the responsibility lies with the charity) and ‘in aid of’ an organisation (where the responsibility remains with the volunteer). The Code incorporates tailored ./guidance for managing both types of volunteer.
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It also covers issues that arise the volunteer carrying out the fundraising is a celebrity.
Rob Jackson, Volunteering Development Manager at RNIB and Chair of the Working Party, said: “This code establishes, for the first time, the standards charities should follow when working with volunteer fundraisers. With millions of people volunteering to fundraise for good causes every year, the code is a critical step towards improving their experience and making them want to come back for more”.
The Code should be used not only by the managers of volunteer fundraisers, but also by trustees and senior management who will need to establish a volunteer policy and to define how their range of volunteer fundraising activities fit within the definitions laid out within the Code.
The new Volunteer Fundraising Code can be downloaded at no charge from the Institute of Fundraising’s website, where a template letter containing ./guidance for ‘in aid of’ volunteer fundraisers is also available.
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.