Volunteer Scotland search

Today is International Volunteer Day. Volunteer Scotland and SCVO today launched a redeveloped volunteer search website with a new address - volunteer.scot.

This has been a joint project between Volunteer Scotland and SCVO. It's a full rebuild from scratch on an in-house SCVO tech stack with a fresh new design developed in-house by Volunteer Scotland. It's taken several months of development and testing to get here.

A shorter address

The old address was search.volunteerscotland.net. The new one, volunteer.scot, is considerably shorter and easier to say out loud as well as to type.

A new look, built for browsing

We've overhauled the design from top to bottom. The old site relied mostly on text. The new one makes room for colour, graphics and images, so organisations can bring their opportunities to life rather than just describing them in a paragraph. Volunteering is often about people and place, and we wanted the site to reflect that.

Search that works harder

The search box has had the biggest technical improvement. We've reworked how it interprets what people type, so it copes better with the way people actually search: by cause, by location, by the kind of thing they want to spend their time doing, rather than exact job titles.

Letting organisations and volunteers add their own content

Two new self-service forms are worth mentioning from a technical point of view. Organisations can now add their own events that need volunteers, without going through Volunteer Scotland's team first. Volunteers and organisations can also upload volunteer stories directly, with header images, listing images and video if they've got them. It means less admin for Volunteer Scotland's team, opportunities can go live faster with a new simple mechanism to promote them, and stories are told in the words of the people who lived them.

My Volunteer Account

We've also built a personalised account area, so volunteers can manage saved searches, applications and their own journey through the site in one place, rather than starting from scratch every visit.

Part of a bigger plan

This redevelopment is one of the key actions of Scotland's Volunteering Action Plan, and it gives that plan a platform to build on for what comes next.

When we launched the site, I said:

That partnership is really the story here. Volunteer Scotland knows what volunteers and voluntary organisations need from a service like this; we build and maintain the platform it runs on.

Thanks to everyone who tested the site ahead of today, and to the Volunteer Scotland team for their hard work and collaboration. You can read about the launch in more detail on the Volunteer Scotland news blog.

If you haven't already, go and have a look for yourself: volunteer.scot