While motivation is highly important in inducing an individual to volunteer, identifying an opportunity to realise this motivation is critical. People are most likely to volunteer when they feel both “willing and able” to respond to a charity’s need for help (Musick and Wilson, 2008: 49). Paradoxically, although a crucial process, research has indicated that recruitment practices for volunteers are weak or non-existent (Low et. al., 2007). Furthermore, the Charity Commission (2005) has identified that 39% of charities experience difficulties in filling vacancies on their trustee boards. They also note that 66% of large charities, and 72% of small charities, have found it difficult to attract trustees with the necessary skills.
Recruitment by “word of mouth” or personal recommendation is the most common method of attracting new trustees although – as discussed in Chapter 3 - this has been criticised for potentially limiting the pool of potential recruits and failing to increase board diversity (Charity Commission, 2007b: 9). Guidance from a range of sources recommends that advertising vacancies should be considered as an option (ACEVO, 2007b: 37; Charity Commission, 2007b; Dyer, 2008: 200) and a range of
trustee recruitment services have emerged, ranging from free advert listings (NCVO, 2012; CTN, 2012) to full brokerage services at a cost to charities (REACH, 2012; Trustees Unlimited, 2012).
In this study, just two participants had become trustees by responding to an advertisement; the majority of trustees interviewed having been recruited to their organisations via word of mouth or personal recommendation.
“Well [Charity A] I was asked to be involved… by the [then] Chief Exec of Liverpool Voluntary Services - I think he was always on the look out for people who he thought would actually be helpful with the voluntary sector - so that’s how I became involved with [Charity A] and [Charity B], and in fact it has always been word of mouth and people asking me. [Charity C] was different… we actually set up [Charity C].” (Annette, Trustee)
“That particular management committee only has people from BRM backgrounds on the committee as part of the ethos of the organisation. So if you happen to be from one of the BRM groups, plus you’ve got the expertise in housing or childcare, finances, whatever, you know you’ll be headhunted to go on there (laughs).” (Dayo, Trustee)
Five participants had become trustees as a result of being involved with new organisations that went on to become registered charities. In these cases, founding members were expected to become trustees to satisfy the requirements of the Charity Commission. For others, their entry into trusteeship was gradual:
“In fact there wasn’t one particular point where they actually said to me, “so you agree to be a trustee then?” I remember actually saying to the coordinator of the charity, the main employee there, that yes I was happy to be a trustee there, but I think I volunteered that. So it was like a gentle approach to encourage me to come to meetings, to then see if it captured my interest and if I had a role to play.” (Nicholas, Trustee)
“I was just going to be a volunteer! (laughs) Well, I was in Australia on a holiday when I got an email to say I’d been nominated as treasurer! And it had been agreed in my absence (laughs). So this is how….it was organic….just ….. ‘you’re going
to be a trustee’…. ‘Oh you’re good at this, you be this’.” (Alice, Trustee)
It was not unusual for trustees to be recruited as a result of their prior involvement with the charity as a volunteer or through their family or professional connections:
“I wouldn’t say I had the passion for what the charity is about, it was just that my wife was working there and that’s what got my interest. Just to help out.” (Colin, Trustee)
“They wanted a lawyer. My (law) firm has done work for [Charity name], I haven’t. One of my partners was approached and the last thing he wanted to be was a trustee at that time so he mentioned it me. I was interested … I thought it is a good thing to get involved in pro bono thing to give something back to the community, also in particular [this charity] because it is a [health charity] and my mum died of that [condition].” (Jonathan, Trustee)
“I actually worked for [charity] … until 1999… and then I retired, but [charity] has a wonderful way of recycling people! So to cut a story short, in 2001 I was invited to become a trustee.” (Pauline, Trustee)
Many participants in the research here had been directly asked to become trustees, and perceived that this influenced their decision to volunteer. This view accords with literature that indicates that personal contact and being asked to volunteer is an important factor in volunteer recruitment (Musick and Wilson, 2008: 288; Rochester et al., 2010: 132), and suggests that despite criticisms of recruitment through personal recommendation (Charity Commission, 2005), the method has its advantages.
“Well, a few years ago, I met the Executive Director here who’s been a family friend for many, many years and he asked me to come on board as a Trustee… he said, ‘Oh, would you come and help us?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, okay, no problem.’ So I came on board for a number of years. I was already a Trustee with a couple of other organisations as well, so I thought yeah, I might as well, you know, a bit of payback and help out in the community.” (Issac, Deputy Manager and former trustee)
“It’s very flattering to be asked, which I think is often the way these things work. People feel flattered to be asked.” (Matthew, Trustee) “I’d be more likely if somebody asked me. I don’t like saying no when it’s face to face. When it is in the paper, or sent home in a school letter, you just go ‘oh no, I’m not really into that at the moment, I haven’t got the time for that’. But when someone has actually taken the time to personally ask you, you kind of go ‘yeah, okay, I could do that.’” (Lucy, Ex-Trustee)
Although most trustees in the study had experienced word of mouth recruitment, the interviews with senior staff revealed a greater diversity of trustee recruitment practices in use. There was a broadly equal split between senior staff that reported their organisations used word of mouth recruitment; those that advertised; and those using a mixture of the two methods. Participants offered examples of how their organisations had used both personal recommendation and advertising to attract trustees:
“We have recruited through an advert to one of those roles. Recently it is back to the other way, which is [through] the contacts we have. Because the person available… we knew he would become available having resigned from another major organisation. We just approached him because it was too good an opportunity to miss.” (Mark, CEO)
“We tend to have people lined up rather than having to advertise. We’ve also worked with the Chamber of Commerce who will do some volunteer recruitment work for us. We’ve also considered advertising in the Society Guardian…” (Gary, Trustee)
Some senior staff members reported that their charities were changing and formalising their approach to trustee recruitment, and perceived that advertising vacancies could attract new trustees with different perspectives and an openness to change:
“Initially, I approached people I knew and trusted. That’s not the case now. The last four or five appointments we’ve made have
been by advert and everybody has a fixed term of three year maximum term with an option to go to a second term but no longer. I just think that’s good governance.” (Matthew, Trustee)
“I think one of the difficulties is that charities potentially become a little bit self perpetuating because the Board recruits the new Board and I think that there is an element ... I mean, it happens in business, it happens in all sorts of walks of life. But people look for people who are like them and what they bring, “Oh yes. This is a good person”, and what they’re actually saying is, “This person agrees with me”.” (Jennie, CEO)
However, organisations that placed advertisements for their trustee recruitment were not always successful in attracting suitable candidates. One participant recalled an interview with a potential trustee where it became clear that they were not suited to the role. Others explained that there were not always sufficient applicants in response to advertisements:
“Yeah, well we do have a recruitment policy where we have an equal opportunities recruitment, so we put out an advert...You don’t always manage to get people through an advert, I have to say… If we don’t get people through advert, we might say, you know, do people know people who could be interested and get them to apply.” (Christine, CEO)
The study here reveals evidence that some of the more formal options for trustee recruitment may be difficult for smaller charities to employ. For example, one participant highlighted the fact that placing adverts in newspapers was prohibitively expensive:
“I think if people realised how interesting it is, that there would be more people coming forward. But a part of the difficulty as well is it’s quite expensive to advertise, and you see the big national charities advertise for trustees on the back page of the Sunday Times job ads, and that’s seriously expensive recruitment.” (Bill, Trustee)
Local volunteer centres are a low cost means of recruiting volunteers, but there was little evidence that charities had successfully recruited volunteer trustees via this route.
“We did go to the volunteer bureau but they don’t seem to get those kinds of volunteers that we need.” (Alice, Trustee)
As one participant explained, he had tried to find a trustee vacancy via his local volunteer centre but was unable to identify an opportunity that he felt would make best use of his professional management skills:
“I actually went through the, I had a look at the...was it the Volunteer Centre? I did go down that route, but the majority of the things that seem to come through there are the helping out on a Wednesday morning in a charity shop, and, not knocking people that do that, that’s just not getting the best leverage out of what I can do.” (Bill, Trustee)
The findings indicate that as well as differing in their approaches to recruitment of trustees, organisations differ in terms of who leads the recruitment exercise. In some, the trustee board, led by the Chair, takes responsibility for filling trustee vacancies. In other organisations, the Chief Executive takes the lead in finding new trustees for the board. In some cases, the task of trustee recruitment is shared between the board and the Chief Executive, with the Chair and CEO both sitting on a recruitment panel for example. This diversity of approach is reflected in the diverging opinions of participants about where the responsibility for trustee recruitment should rest. Guidance from the Charity Commission (2007b: 11) makes explicit that legal responsibility for trustee recruitment rests with the trustee board and that they should retain overall control of the process, even if they delegate elements of the task to staff. However, the findings of this research indicate that, in practice, staff sometimes play leading roles in the process of finding new trustees for their organisations. Some participants felt very strongly that the board or Chair should recruit new members, and that CEO-led recruitment was
inappropriate in view of the fact that the board should hold the CEO to account in their work:
“[Recruitment is led] always by the Chair. I don’t think that the chief executive has a place at all in recruiting trustees. I think that is a dangerous road to go down. We may meet people and make a mention to the Chair. I am involved in a number of networks where I see people with different hats on. I think it is a complete folly to have a chief executive choosing trustees. Absolutely not.” (Mark, CEO)
“The board of trustees in the previous organisation I was in was basically selected from friends and followers and admirers of the manager of the charity. It was basically her fanclub. And I wasn’t a member of the trustee committee because I was a member of staff but I remember thinking that the trustees… all they had to do was turn up for meetings, listen to how wonderful the boss said she was and vote her a pay increase.” (Sian, Trustee)
However others felt that the CEO and senior staff team are often better placed to identify the attributes needed among new trustees:
“I think I would say speak to the Chief Exec, speak to the Senior Management Team and ask them what they need in a trustee. Because I think there’s an element of, ‘I know somebody, they’d be a good trustee’ in the board themselves and the difficulty with that is that you tend to get people who may or may not be providing what you need, bringing other people in who are like them who may or may not provide what they need, and so you know, you get people who are very similar coming in and I think if the Senior Management Team were consulted, they would know whether they are getting what they need and therefore they know what they want.” (Jennie, CEO)
“And if I was to say what are the ingredients of being a successful trustee recruiter, you need a strong, assertive, dynamic Chief Exec. Because she targets the people; she looks at it, she thinks ‘I need someone with that’, or ‘I need someone with that’, and then she goes and pursues them” (Mick, Trustee)
Some participants raised the issue of diversity among trustees, in particular making reference to concerns about the under-representation of young people in trustee positions (Charity Commission, 2010). Good
practice guidance emphasises the benefits of recruiting individuals from diverse backgrounds to serve as trustees, pointing to increased accountability, access to skills and knowledge and transparency (Charity Commission, 2007b; Lesirge et al., 2006). A recent report by the Charity Commission (2010: 3) used focus groups to investigate potential reasons for the under-representation of young people in trustee positions, noting that fewer than 0.5% of trustees are aged 18-24. Its findings suggested that young people lack awareness of trusteeship, were concerned about the heavy responsibility and time commitment and lacked confidence that they had appropriate attributes to offer to the role.
Two of the participants in this study were trustees aged 18-24 and they offered similar perspectives to those in the Charity Commission research, identifying a lack of awareness and concerns about required prior experience as potential barriers to increasing the numbers of young people serving as charity trustees:
“I suppose speaking to my friends and my course-mates, they don’t know what a trustee would do and so when they’re looking to do volunteering or work with a charity, they look more towards … collections or fundraisings or they’ll go work in a soup kitchen two days a week” (Kirsty, Trustee)
“I think… you go into being a trustee for the experience. You don’t necessarily have a great deal of that, there are only so many years you can have under your belt working in a company. But maybe if they outline their expectations of a trustee who’s younger, and just say, look, we don’t expect you to be aware of things which some senior director of all sorts of companies would be, but you know we still really value a fresh perspective and if you’ve got some good ideas, that’s great. I suppose you just have to reassure them [young people] more than anything that they’ve got something valuable to contribute. Because I think you just don’t necessarily think that you would do. Its only because its been suggested to me by other people who know what charities value that I even got involved. I would have thought it was something for me to do in ten, twenty years time. You don’t necessarily consider it.” (Hannah, Trustee)
Interestingly, one of the ‘young’ trustees in the research revealed that she might favour older people if she were recruiting to fill trustee vacancies, since she perceived that they would be more likely to have greater levels of experience to offer:
“I think when you’re looking for that external trustee role, I don’t know if it’s just stereotypical but you’re looking for someone with experience and so that’s normally conducive to someone that’s older and has experienced more and, probably, one would hope for somebody who had been a trustee before. I don’t think we’d necessarily not consider anyone who’s younger, I think it depends on levels of experience and the sort of trustee that you would like but I think, I don’t know for certain, but I’d probably go for someone older, if it was me.” (Kirsty, Trustee)
One of the older trustees participating in the research also commented on the relative lack of young people taking up trusteeships, and perceived a change in the ways in which people undertake voluntary action:
“You find youngsters who’ve been gaily marching against things and for things, going to camps and yet never dream of sitting on a committee to organise it. For yet my generation, its the British thing to do – if something needs doing, set up a committee! Nowadays if something needs doing get on Facebook and Twitter and organise it.” (Peter, Trustee)
One participant perceived a potential tension between the aim of recruiting young people as trustees and the need to ensure trustees have appropriate skills and experience to fulfil their legal responsibilities. One suggestion was that young people could be invited to join boards as observers initially, to give them an opportunity to prepare themselves for the legal responsibilities of trusteeship:
“I love the idea that a board ought to be encouraging people, a young person say, onto a board, who acknowledges they don’t have the skills and knowledge and experience and competencies. But on day one of signing up they have the legal responsibility and how do we marry those, I don’t quite know. Perhaps we ought to be looking at some models whereby a new trustee arrives and we encourage young people onto a board by having them as observers for a period of time and allowing them to work with the
board but not yet take the legal responsibility. Or we just