We need student volunteers to assist us with developing and implemeting a marketing plan with a campaign to help us to recruit more Listening and Support Volunteers for our branch.

We are a branch of the national Samaritans charity based in Northallerton, North Yorkshire, providing emotional support for our telephone callers. We have been based in Northallerton for over 60 years. We receive a diverse range of calls from individuals in need of emotional support on our 116 123 helplines, most often centred around issues associated with work, money or relationships and often complicated by suffering with their mental health or isolation and loneliness. These callers could be having suicidal thoughts as well in the process of taking their own lives when they call.

We currently have 46 active volunteers of which 41 are Listening Volunteers and 5 are Support Volunteers,

We wish to develop and execute a marketing plan to promote the role of a Samaritans Volunteer with the objective of encouraging a diverse range of suitable potential volunteers to apply from the town of Northallerton and surrounding towns and villages for a listening volunteering role within the Samaritans Northallerton Branch.

We need to increase our branch volunteer base to around 50 within the next 3 years. Over the past 6 years our volunteer base has been static – as many volunteers leaving as joining. We need growth to enable us to meet our objective of having volunteers available to cover all our telephone answering shifts throughout the week – day as well as night.

The Northallerton branch covers several 3-hour shifts on the phones throughout the week and on average we manage to cover 70% of the shifts by having 2 volunteers available per shift. However, for more critical shifts where callers are in greatest need of support – predominantly nighttime shifts - this level of coverage falls to around 58% for 22:00-01:00HRS and down to just 14% for 01:00-04:00HRS. This could mean that callers could be waiting 18 minutes on average for their call to be answered compared to 3-4 minutes.

Working with our volunteer Strategic Marketing Lead based in branch, we are looking for student volunteer[s] to assist with developing and executing a marketing plan with a campaign to recruit volunteers who, upon completing our comprehensive training and mentoring programme, could cover shifts, especially the nighttime ones. Ideally a significant proportion of these volunteers would reside within the town of Northallerton itself where travel to branch would be less problematic and they could cover shifts at short notice. The majority of our current volunteers live in towns and villages outside Northallerton which can be problematic, especially during bad weather.

We have attempted recruitment campaigns in the past but with minimal success.  We need some external expertise and fresh ideas not only to deliver creativity but help with identifying the route to market. Our Strategic Marketing Lead has done research in the past, but we feel fresh ideas, creativity and insight would be extremely valuable. We do have resources such as stock adverts but whatever is created must sit within the Samaritans brand, values and policies.

The student volunteer[s] would not need to travel to our branch in Northallerton – majority could be done via Zoom. However periodic visits would be of benefit upon which travel expenses would be made. Interested applicants should contact the Branch Director, Julian Hooker in the first instance. They would then be given instructions on how to apply as a Support Volunteer, after which a Zoom interview would be arranged. DBS checks would need be made, and mandatory on-line training modules would need to be completed on safeguarding and Equity Diversity and Inclusion (taking around 40 minutes each).

Benefits for the volunteer student[s] volunteering with Samaritans would be applying their knowledge and skills to gain experience working for an established charity. Whatever the overall outcome may be for the project, students will gain experience developing and implementing marketing plans. Students volunteering with Samaritans as Support Volunteers would offer them a great sense of fulfilment by contributing towards helping our callers in need of emotional support and our vision of ‘reducing deaths by suicide’. It may also help to create further awareness of the services Samaritans offers within the student community should anyone need emotional support in the future.