A full-day interactive workshop for university staff responsible for attracting, motivating, and rewarding staff volunteers to support student recruitment, widening participation, and outreach activity.
Monday 17 November 2025
9:30am to 4pm
Steamhouse
Belmont Row
Birmingham
B4 7RQ
£275 + VAT – early bird price until 31 October
20 spaces
Do you regularly seek the support of staff volunteers?
This training day has been designed for you.
You will learn how to:
Detailed descriptions of all three sessions can be found below.
This training workshop is for outreach professionals who regularly seek staff volunteers to support flagship projects, such as:
It will help you attract, motivate, and reward staff volunteers from a variety of areas, including:
This training workshop will also benefit colleagues who regularly seek staff volunteers for projects outside of student recruitment, such as graduation ceremonies, giving days, and welcome week.
Our student recruitment projects wouldn’t be possible without staff volunteers. Our ambitious campus-wide (and nation-wide) projects require way more staff than our own teams can offer. It takes a village.
Ambassadors are a huge help, but sometimes you need a fully-fledged staff member to grab the megaphone, unfurl the banner, take to the stage, coordinate tours, and strap on the Clearing headset. Luckily, we work in enormous organisations with thousands of employees. Finding staff volunteers should be easy, right?
Um. Not quite. Our colleagues are busy with their own priorities. The university doesn’t stop for open days (or anything else) no matter their importance. So, how do we encourage staff from other departments to lend a helping hand? Build it into their contracts? Peer pressure from above? Constant cajoling?
This full-day workshop will show you that the infamous "three-line whip" is nothing compared to a three-line carrot. We’ll provide an in-depth look at volunteer strategy with interactive exercises, volunteer theory, management models, breakout discussions, and a wealth of detailed examples from across the sector.
Pretty soon, you’ll find yourself with an enthusiastic community of (repeat) volunteers, with the mindset and skillet to bring your ambitious outreach projects to life.
We pride ourselves on delivering inspiring, interactive, and insightful training days. If you join us, you will experience a fun, feel-good training event, with hands-on activities and plenty of opportunity for participation.
We’ll grow your knowledge and network in equal measure. This is aided by group exercises, multiple refreshment breaks, and complimentary drinks at the end of the day. You’ll depart with a community of fellow volunteer coordinators from across the sector who’ll continue to support you long after the training day has ended.
The cost for this training day is £275 + VAT. This is the early bird price, available until Friday 31 October. It will then increase to £300 + VAT. There are discounts for multiple bookings, as highlighted on the booking form below.
Volunteering is the best. It allows staff members outside of student recruitment to get a front row seat to the most exciting projects on campus. Volunteers are fast-tracked to the university equivalent of the Superbowl, the Olympics, the Eras Tour, and given the chance to shine.
In doing so, staff members will broaden their network, add pages of skills to their CV, and enjoy a meaningful experience. They might even discover a talent for student recruitment, which prompts a curveball in their current career path. But how do we get our colleagues to know that? How do we cut through the noise of their busy day jobs?
This first session will help you promote your volunteering opportunities. We’ll look at the world-class basics of readability, the importance of an omni-channel promotional plan, and the difference between highlighting features, benefits, and stories. We’ll also explore the power of advocacy with some light-touch influencer psychology.
Next, we’ll consider the critical process of proactivity. At times, we’ll need to actively headhunt to secure staff volunteers who fulfil the quantity, quality, and diversity required by our events. We might need to enlist the help of certain directors and deans to unlock new silos of staff volunteers who are otherwise beyond our reach.
To achieve this goal, we’ll end by exploring stakeholder engagement tools, influencer mapping, and online (and offline) social listening.
You’ve been successful. You’re gathered a promising pool of staff volunteers. But numbers aren’t enough. Your volunteers also need know-how and nurturing. This session will help you navigate your newfound volunteers from signing-up to showing-up to showing-up in style.
Firstly, we’ll look at the importance of an engaging training session, instead of a tired Teams briefing. You’ll participate in a few exercises yourself, assuming the part of a volunteer, which you can take back to your own campuses.
Secondly, we’ll explore classical management models – Maslow, McGregor, Herzberg – and what this means for your volunteers. These models are renowned for motivating employees in the workplace, and they’re just as relevant for your volunteers (perhaps even more so).
Finally, we’ll cover ways to create a culture of psychological safety amongst your volunteers. You’ll learn how to build a sense of community, support, and independence throughout their volunteering opportunity. We’ll draw upon the famous Fish Philosophy and demonstrate how this quartet of principles will motivate your volunteers to just keep swimming.
The open day is over. The Clearing lines are closed. The exhibition tablecloths are being neatly folded away. Farewell, volunteers… Not exactly. Their volunteer shift might be over, but our relationship with our volunteers is only just beginning. After all, we want them to volunteer for us again, so we must deploy the two magic words: thank you.
Our alumni colleagues devote entire teams to thanking, celebrating, and rewarding their volunteers. This area is known as stewardship. We must do the same. This session will show how you can reward your volunteers with the three-S model: success, surveys, and surprises. In doing so, they will feel valued, heard, and seen.
The latter will introduce the concept of "surprise and delight" followed by professional volunteer coordinators. You’ll discover a treasure trove of examples from across the sector, including specific examples from our own UniTasterDays training portfolio.
These little low-cost gestures will ensure your volunteers depart with a spring in their step, a bursting sense of pride, and a gushing LinkedIn post on the way. They might even tell their colleagues, which brings us full circle to attracting volunteers again!
Simon has almost 20 years of experience in the higher education sector. This includes student recruitment, marketing, and events roles at four different universities in the UK: Nottingham, Birmingham, Warwick, and Coventry.
Throughout his career, Simon has led staff volunteers in a wide range of projects, such as open days, ambassador recruitment, and graduation ceremonies. Prior to this, Simon led fundraising and campaigning volunteers during his time as an SU staff member, sabbatical officer, and society committee member.
Simon has a particular flair for designing engaging training sessions, developed through his previous consulting and volunteering roles. Currently, he leads the training portfolio for UniTasterDays, including their quarterly training days in Birmingham, on-campus training for staff, on-campus training for ambassadors, 6-week leadership course, and 6-week manager course.
Past recipients of Simon’s training include AccessHE, LiNCHigher, Liverpool Hope University, London Higher, Queen Mary University of London, St Mary’s University, Study Higher, the University of Aberdeen, the University of Bristol, the University of Essex, the University of Salford, the University of Sunderland, and various HELOA regional groups.
Finally, Simon is an international speaker. He has spoken at a variety of conferences, including CASE, ContentEd, EFMD, IDPE, FindAUniversity, HELOA, HighEdWeb, PSEWeb, SU Digital, SU Marketing Conference, and Utterly Content. He was Chair of the Newcomers Track at CASE Europe Annual Conference from 2020 to 2023.
You have your own expertise and experience to share as the managers, officers, coordinators, and administrators responsible for coordinating staff volunteers.
This training will invite you to share your valuable knowledge, practices, and stories with your fellow attendees. We’d love to hear everything – your success and messes, your wins and wobbles – through group exercises and full-room discussion.
Rest assured, there’ll be no pressure to share. But if you do have wisdom to offer, and tactics to champion, then the floor is yours. There’s no ‘i’ in team. And there’s no ‘i’ in staff volunteers.
If Birmingham is too far, then we’d love to come to you instead. We can deliver this training day (and many others) on your very own campus. This option is perfect for large teams or departments who would benefit from the same learning, perhaps at a future away day.
We also offer a selection of training days for student ambassadors. These training days are energising sessions designed to complement your own training, delivered in partnership with yourselves. You can learn more at the links below.