Show your commitment to excellence in volunteer management!
The Valuing Volunteers Quality Mark helps you show that your organisation provides a great experience for volunteers.
It’s a sign of quality for funders, volunteers, and the community.
Why Choose Our Quality Mark?
It’s a free and a simple process!
We have used focus group feedback from small community groups to develop a quality mark that, unlike national quality marks, is free, accessible and supportive for small community groups with limited time and capacity.
We will offer tailored support, training, and templates to help you.
How it Works:
- Attend our workshops for volunteer managers.
- Self-Assessment: Complete our easy checklist.
- Support: Get help from other volunteer managers through our workshops, as well as our policy templates if you need them.
- Submit your policies to us for assessment.
- Certification: Receive a certificate and digital badge valid for two years.
Impress Funders
Mentioning you have the quality mark will show funders you have excellence in volunteer management.
Attract Volunteers
You can give volunteers more confidence that they will have a positive experience.
Boost Your Profile
Use the Valuing Volunteers logo in your digital and printed publicity.
The training covers: –
- Planning for volunteers
- Business planning & financial implications,
- Insurance
- GDPR & Information Commissioners Office
- Safer Recruitment – DBS & volunteers with lived experience
- Volunteer Policy template to take away (digital copies also)
- Volunteer Expenses templates to take away (digital copies also)
- Quality Mark self-assessment tool
- Essential & best practice policy templates to take away (digital copies also)
- Sample policies and adaptations
- Additional documentation – volunteer agreement, volunteer handbook
Blackburn dates are as follows: –
Volunteer Managers/Quality Mark training
Community CVS offers free workshops that cover everything you need to have in place if you involve volunteers, how to recruit motivate and retain volunteers plus access to useful templates and resources to save you time. We go through the must do’s and should do’s.
Is it free?
The programme is FREE to all groups or organisations that involve volunteers in Blackburn with Darwen Borough.
Who is it for?
The workshops are for anyone who is responsible for volunteers – whether you are from a small community group and you are doing this on a voluntary basis yourself, or your job is a volunteer coordinator/ volunteer manager.
The workshops will give you an understanding of what you should have in place when involving volunteers, in order to fulfil your legal responsibility and to be able to recruit and retain volunteers. You will also save time and effort by gaining access to useful resources and templates and gain peer support from others who have responsibilities for volunteers in their group or organisation.
What do the workshops cover?
The current programme touches upon the following areas: –
- The roles of the Volunteer Manager/Coordinator
- Marketing & Volunteer recruitment
- Recruitment & Selection
- Volunteer recruitment strategy & meaningful volunteer role descriptions
- Volunteer training and development
- Why is managing volunteers different to managing paid staff
- Volunteer Manager qualities inc Affective Commitment & Emotional intelligence
- Knowing your volunteers – support, motivation, rapport, problem solving
- Volunteer recognition & retention
- Dealing with Difficulties in a trauma informed way
- Difficult conversations
- Monitoring & Gathering data
- Quantifying Volunteer impact
- Exiting Volunteers
- Support & Resources
You can also attend further sessions in order to achieve our Valuing Volunteers Quality Mark. The Quality Mark training covers: –
- Planning for volunteers
- Business planning & financial implications,
- Insurance
- GDPR & Information Commissioners Office
- Safer Recruitment – DBS & volunteers with lived experience
- Volunteer Policy template to take away (digital copies also)
- Volunteer Expenses templates to take away (digital copies also)
- Quality Mark self-assessment tool
- Essential & best practice policy templates to take away (digital copies also)
- Sample policies and adaptations
- Additional documentation – volunteer agreement, volunteer handbook
When will the workshops run?
This is a three-day programme that will be delivered on a rolling basis in the Conference Room at our Boulevard Centre between 10am and 1.30pm. We are happy to consider running the workshops over four half days if there is sufficient demand.
2026’s dates are as follows: –
For more information about the workshops and to inform the trainer you wish to attend to achieve the quality mark, contact Denise Hayhurst at denise.hayhurst@communitycvs.org.uk.
Achievers
Last updates: Monday 9th February 2026