97. Volunteero: the volunteer management software untangling charity red tape

Founder: Ashley Staines and Kedar Kasarekar
Year founded: 2020
Website: volunteero.org

Volunteers are needed to tackle just about every issue we face in society, but the process of organising them remains archaic. Volunteer management is fraught with inefficiencies, which leads to vast amounts of wasted time and money for the charity, as well as a poor volunteer experience.

This is something Ashley Staines experienced firsthand as a volunteer. While working for various charity organisations, he encountered multiple organisational issues that didn’t maximise the time and effort put in by volunteers or the benefit to the charities themselves. His most valuable contribution, he realised, would be to digitise the volunteer management process.

So, Staines founded Volunteero, a new workforce management platform that simplifies the process of volunteer onboarding, scheduling, communicating and tracking. With Volunteero, volunteers and charities can slash down the red tape and focus on what matters most: making a positive impact on their community.

For our platform to be a viable option, the amount of features needed was vast,

It seems like an obvious solution to an issue that many of us have encountered. So why has Volunteero only emerged now? As Staines reveals, the platform required a hefty amount of R&D to help service a sector that has largely been ignored by tech providers in the past.

“For our platform to be a viable option, the amount of features needed was vast,” says Staines. “We are only just getting to this point now, three and a half years later. We started with very simple and specific volunteer use cases and built upon that.”

Volunteero is now backed by various early stage venture capital firms including Octopus Ventures and Antler, and multiple angel investors from some of the best-known social impact startups. Its impressive client list includes Citizens Advice, RAF Museum, Oxford NHS Trust, and Age UK.

Staines says clients see, on average, 90% of their volunteer users on the app every month. He says he is particularly proud of the fact that Volunteero has successfully facilitated over 10 years of volunteering (so far).

In the coming years, Staines hopes Volunteero will be the de facto volunteering app, supporting all the biggest charities in the UK as clients and making decent headway in the US too.

As we kick off 2025, Volunteero is poised to change the face of volunteering in an era when we made need it most. With its user-friendly platform and impressive track record, Volunteero is the partner that charities always needed.