Introduction

Citizens Advice is a national charity delivering free, impartial advice across the UK. They approached Land Digital and Layers Studio to rethink how volunteer recruitment worked across the organisation, from initial awareness through to onboarding.

The Challenge

Despite a national platform existing, each Citizens Advice office recruits volunteers independently. This had created fragmented processes and inconsistent experiences. Through early discovery work, I identified five core issues: manual workflows managed via email and spreadsheets; a national site that lacked clarity and personalisation; limited accessibility for underrepresented communities; poor reporting and insight capabilities; and a slow, disconnected onboarding experience.

What I Did

I led a mixed-methods research programme across the full volunteer recruitment journey. This included running 10 workshops with 69 participants (local office staff, volunteers, and trustees), conducting 8 semi-structured interviews with 13 national stakeholders across volunteering, digital, data governance, and accessibility teams, and distributing surveys to 294 participants, covering potential volunteers, applicants, and the general public. I synthesised findings using thematic coding and quantitative analysis to map drop-off points in the recruitment funnel and identify requirements across functional, technical, and strategic dimensions.

The output was a detailed framework and recommendations document, a strategic blueprint giving Citizens Advice and Land Digital a confident foundation for the next phase of design and development.