Pride Cymru is a volunteer-led charity committed to campaigning for equality and acceptance of diversity within our communities. They recognise and celebrate the contributions made by LGBTQ+ people in society and work to create opportunities for LGBTQ+ people around Wales to connect and support each other.
Despite some progress in legislation, the fight for equality and inclusion for the LGBT+ community is far from over.
As well as their annual Pride event which connects the LGBT+ community physically, they work throughout the year to increase engagement between different parts of the LGBT+ community so that people can grow as a united and empowered part of society.
Pride Cymru recruit and support a core team of volunteers who work year-round to make their organisational mission and annual pride event a reality. The parade has grown immensely since 2012 and is recognised as Cardiff’s most colourful and inclusive event and with that they also need a team of event volunteers to ensure the parade runs smoothly and gets its full moment in the spotlight.
We first met the Pride Cymru team in early 2023 where they were grappling with an outdated system called PAAM to manage their volunteers. That system meant that the team were faced with several challenges including:
- Difficult to access and manage the volunteer database
- No scheduling tool (essential for events management)
- Emails going into volunteer junk inboxes
- No way of grouping volunteers per task
- Hard to navigate system.
- Time-consuming to organise volunteer tasks.
The results
Pride Cymru jumped straight into using Volunteero and took advantage of our custom forms feature to recruit and onboard 153 volunteers.
Simultaneously, the core team created several events for volunteering tasks in the run-up to and including the Pride parade.
Once trained and onboarded, the core team made use of Volunteero’s groups and tags feature to differentiate types of volunteers within the organisation to ensure missions were visible to volunteers in the correct teams.
Training coordinator Roxanne, who is also a volunteer told us that “Volunteero’s Group chat feature was really useful to mass contact participants and allow them to talk to each other.”
What had previously taken at least 5 hours per activity using their old system now takes them 1 hour to complete with Volunteero. Meaning that a whopping 20 hours of admin time was saved when planning and organising volunteers for the two-day weekend pride event. This time saving for the core volunteer team meant that they could reallocate resources to other areas of the organisation, supporting their volunteers and retaining them for future events.
It’s no surprise to hear that the Pride Cymru event was a roaring success, with the event being spotlighted by the BBC and with one attendee sharing “This is proof of the progress that humanity is making, people can be themselves, people can be loved and human and it's amazing”.
In the lead-up to the event and over the weekend, 142 volunteers signed up for a mission and 72% engaged with the Volunteero app.
Their efforts resulted in 6,180 minutes of volunteering time dedicated to Pride Cymru and we have no doubts that the event will only continue to grow and shine in their community.
Speaking on why they loved Volunteero, Roxanne shared:
“Volunteero is the compass that guides passion towards purpose. It has transformed how we manage our volunteers making it easier and quicker to find the right opportunity for the right person, helping us further the impact of our charity.”
As we enter into 2024, Pride Cymru have already received an additional 53 volunteer applications, the team are excited to utilise their favourite feature; missions which allows their volunteers to self-serve by claiming shifts and activities in the app that suit their skill base and availability.
From all of us at Volunteero, we hope for another successful and bright 2024 parade for all involved!
If you would like to understand how Volunteero could help you achieve similar results with your volunteering program, book a demo today!
