SINGAPORE - Data analyst Samuel Fong devotes about 60 hours a year reading to the children at Shine Children and Youth Services, where he has been a volunteer for the last seven years.

       The charity in Hougang serves about 6,000 students a year. Mr Fong also provides academic coaching for students who need it.

       This is how Mr Fong, 33, tries to repay the kindness that volunteers showed him when he needed a hand as a child after he was found to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

       Mr Fong credits the charity group with adopting practices that have helped him stick with it.

       For instance, Shine customises volunteer roles that are “palatable for volunteers to take part in”, and spells out clearly what it requires of them.

       The charity also has regular debriefs and close supervision to “ensure the volunteers feel supported in their volunteering journey”.

       “Shine engages volunteers to take on leadership roles and support the staff in the programme operations. These volunteer leaders play an important role in helping the others stay connected,” Mr Fong said.

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       He added that he is still volunteering with the charity because he is “fairly satisfied by the work we are doing”.

       Charities in Singapore like Shine are adopting volunteer management practices – spelt out by the National Council of Social Service (NCSS) – that have helped to not only recruit more volunteers but also to retain them.

       Introduced in 2014 and revised in 2020, the NCSS Volunteer Management Framework suggests hiring volunteer managers, building volunteer skills, and fostering a culture where volunteers are essential to the organisation. Key strategies include setting clear role expectations for volunteers and regularly communicating with them to keep them engaged.

       Over the past few years, St Luke’s ElderCare has almost doubled its pool of volunteers to about 3,000 and helped the organisation to improve its services. The charity says it was able to achieve this by implementing NCSS’ volunteer management practices.

       Its chief executive Kenny Tan said of the volunteers: “As they serve our elders, we also seek to enrich their lives and have been making intentional efforts to build our volunteer management capabilities holistically.”

       The charity, which focuses on services for the elderly such as home-based nursing and home-based personal care, said the increase in volunteers was the result of better management, including the hiring of dedicated volunteer managers.

       The charity, which now has a team of five volunteer managers, said the managers engage different groups of volunteers such as schools, corporate groups, communities, churches, interest groups and individuals.

       This gives them more focus and drive to grow the volunteer pool, leading the volunteers to serve more regularly and even developing some of them into volunteer leaders, the charity said.

       A study by the National Volunteer and Philanthropy Centre in June showed the volunteerism rate in Singapore had risen from 22 per cent in 2021 to 30 per cent in 2023. The increase is likely due to the lifting of Covid-19 restrictions, the centre said.

       NCSS’ Social Service Sector Survey on Volunteer Management, released in August, reported that social service agencies that had reinforced their volunteer management capabilities enjoyed up to three times more volunteer hours.

       The Singapore Association for Mental Health (SAMH) is another example of a charity reaping the benefits of better managing its volunteers.

       Between 2021 and 2023, the charity had a 431 per cent increase in the number of regular volunteers, from 26 to 138. This was after it hired a volunteer management manager, digitised its volunteer database and centralised volunteer information to streamline onboarding and management.

       According to NCSS, a regular volunteer is someone who has a minimum of four volunteering sessions annually.

       The larger volunteer pool has improved its community engagement and expanded outreach, the charity said. For example, the regular volunteers help to raise mental health awareness through one of SAMH’s initiatives, #ItStartsFromHome.

       Children’s Wishing Well, a charity that supports children and youth, said that while adopting better volunteer management strategies has not boosted its numbers, it has helped the charity to create more meaningful roles for its volunteers by aligning their tasks with their skills and interests.

       There is a stronger sense of ownership and involvement among its volunteers and they stay on longer, Children’s Wishing Well said. It recruits about 100 volunteers a month and engaged almost 1,500 volunteers in 2023.

       “We now have clearer pathways for ongoing communication and feedback, which help us address any concerns promptly and enhance their overall experience,” said the charity’s spokesperson.

       National University of Singapore (NUS) sociologist Joonmo Son said regular volunteerism is important in building a culture of volunteerism.

       “It is crucial to inculcate a sense of ownership of the cause and maintain good volunteer management in terms of training and preventing burnout,” Prof Son said.

       Fellow NUS sociologist Tan Ern Ser added: “The issue is always that of commitment. Being charitable is part of our culture, but often the commitment is weak. One way to tackle this is to allow volunteers to commit to what they can realistically commit to.”

       While the NCSS survey points to the positive impact of adopting its methods to better manage volunteers, two smaller charities told The Straits Times that they simply do not have the resources to implement such strategies.

       One of them, Krsna’s Free Meals, struggles with volunteers who back out at the last minute, leaving it short-handed. The soup kitchen, which serves three meals daily to mainly migrant workers living around Little India, has no full-time staff. It requires 17 volunteers daily to serve over 3,700 meals daily.

       In June, the soup kitchen took to social media to air its grievances about groups of volunteers backing out at the last minute. In an update on TikTok in late July, the soup kitchen said it was still experiencing the problem.

       According to its co-founder Latha Govindasamy, Krsna’s Free Meals averages about two volunteer no-shows for its daily breakfast and lunch sessions. The main reasons given were sickness and volunteers realising they could not cope with the physical demands of their tasks, which includes cooking the meals, cleaning the kitchen and handing out the meals.

       Ms Latha said the charity does not have the resources to implement volunteer management strategies.

       “We have no extra volunteers to institute the (volunteer management) programmes. We need all hands on deck to serve our beneficiaries because if we don’t, the meals will not get served in time for them to make it to their places of employment,” she added.

       Ms Eva Tan, a regular volunteer at Krsna’s Free Meals, said: “When volunteers back out at the last minute, it puts additional pressure on the remaining team members. We have to be flexible and adaptable, sometimes stepping in to cover their duties.”