Volunteers
In 2023, Macmillan had over 11,600 active
volunteers who donated over 100,000 hours of
their time. This represents a significant increase on
the 10,000 Macmillan volunteers who gave 80,000
hours in 2022 and was driven by the expansion of
the Macmillan Buddy service, as well as increased
numbers of volunteers taking part in fundraising
volunteering such as our M&S and Costa Coffee
store collections in September. Macmillan volunteers
support the organisation in a range of ways:
Our Macmillan Buddy volunteers supported over
3,500 people living with cancer, offering support
over the phone, via video call and at home. You
can read more about this on page 18.
Our fundraising volunteers supported 139 events
across the UK - from cheering our participants at
sporting events, to running in-store collections, to
event support at Macmillan Mighty Hikes - helping
us to raise £30 million.
Members of the Cancer Voices community were
involved in 26 projects across Macmillan, ensuring
that the personal experiences of people with
cancer shape our decision-making, and influence
our work and services.
We also benefitted from the support of 1,500
volunteers from within our corporate partners,
who provided more than 5,500 hours of their time
and delivered 3,000 care packages to people
living with cancer on Macmillan's behalf.
Improving our volunteer experience.
We completed a thorough review of Buddy
volunteer recruitment in early 2023. Changes
implemented as a result have broadened the appeal
to more people, shortened onboarding times,
increased volunteer satisfaction and improved
performance efficiency.
We use a range of channels to actively engage
with volunteers and seek their feedback, including
our volunteer forum, annual volunteer experience
survey11 and complaints. In our 2023 volunteer
experience survey, we asked volunteers what would
improve their experience and we received 580
responses. These themes came up frequently:
• Learning and development - including
not assuming IT literacy, and more
face-to-face training.
• Resourcing - including easier access to useful
materials and leaflets to help at events.
• Communications - including more
organisational updates.
In response to the feedback, we have implemented
several initiatives to improve the experience of
our volunteers. This includes making changes to
support volunteers who were previously unable to
participate due to financial barriers or barriers to
accessing online channels.
We also began work to develop a new learning
management system which will improve volunteers'
experiences of learning and development and
introduced more organisational updates through our
volunteer newsletters, social media and other online
channels.
In 2023, we received 159 complaints from volunteers
through our feedback channels. These were largely
in relation to learning and development accessibility,
and specific volunteer experiences at fundraising
collections. These themes have been explored via
the UK volunteer forum.
Volunteer at The Great North Run
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Environmental, social
and governance review
Financial review
Strategic report
Overview Financial statements Thank you