Our organisation: depressioNet

My responsibilities: I am currently involved in directly managing our volunteers. This includes everything from recruitment, induction and training to supervision and exit interviews.

Our team: We have a great team of mental health professionals, fundraising and business support and IT staff within the office. In addition we have around 65 volunteers in a wide variety of roles. depressioNet is essentially a volunteer run organisation. It is our volunteers who provide the vast majority of our services, providing strategic advice and review for each department and have oversight of the entire organisation. All staff, irrespective of their role, work to support volunteers. It is through volunteers that we are able to have such a positive impact on the lives of our clients.

Our greatest challenges: depressioNet is in a very positive space as an organisation so the challenges we face are around finding ways to effectively improve and expand our range of services, to provide more comprehensive support to a larger range of people.

What inspired you to get involved in your organisation? depressioNet is an amazing concept that has been implemented incredibly well. We have the ability to reach anyone in the country with an internet connection. To provide that support over any distance is a tool with enormous potential.

How have you utilised goodcompany (please provide an example of a recent volunteer project outcome)? We regularly use goodcompany as a great source of volunteers with a broad range of professional expertise. Our typical volunteer project would be for someone in a strategic or advisory position however we have had a lot of success in attracting volunteers to facilitate our Peer Support Service. We hope to recruit a broad range of people with different life experience. goodcompany is one of the sources we utilise to ensure a diverse volunteer base.

Tips for Community Groups working with skilled volunteers: Understand each volunteer’s deeper motivation for helping out. Then catch up at least every 3 months to see how they are going and where their expectations are. Quite often a volunteer who is finding their role stale or monotonous can be moved into something else within your organisation. It’s just a case of turning your to-do list into their opportunities.

Tips for Volunteers working with community groups in skilled volunteering: Every Not-For-Profit organisation endeavours to make sure their volunteers are having a fun and satisfying experience; however, quite often there is a queue of crises to be managed. Helpful volunteers are rarely the most pressing problem. If you are feeling that you are losing energy or interest for your volunteer role let the organisation know. Not-For-Profits inevitably want to retain helpful volunteers for as long as possible, and so just because your current role has become stale doesn’t mean there isn’t something else you could be doing that might be more satisfying.