With the country currently gripped by World Cup fever, it may be easy for many people outside Scotland to forget that the world’s sporting elite will be returning to the UK next month for the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games. As the eyes of the world turn once more to Britain, comparisons with the London 2012 Olympic Games are inevitable.

Some of us at nfpSynergy are wary that media coverage of the 15,000 volunteers (‘Clyde-siders’ as they have been dubbed) at the Commonwealth Games may once again reignite the tired debate about the Olympic volunteering legacy of 2012. We thought we’d attempt to get out in front of this debate and make a plea to the sector to finally put to bed the head-shaking over the supposed failure of the third sector to ‘capitalise’ on the legacy.

Despite an initial rise in volunteering rates, two separate surveys, carried out by Olympic legacy charity ‘Join In’ and nfpSynergy respectively in 2013, both found that only 2% of people had volunteered more as a result of the games.

With the benefit of hindsight, many in the third sector now feel that the expectations of what the Olympics would do for volunteering were grandiose, and therefore doomed to appear to fall short. The expectation that enthusiasm for volunteering at a high-profile international event would translate into a blanket rise in volunteering in general now seems slightly naive.

A study of 2012 Game makers found that the top motivation for volunteering was ‘It was the chance of a lifetime’. Volunteering for the Olympics differs from most other volunteering roles in that it allowed them to be a part of an event that was perceived as both glamorous and historic.

This is a rather different proposition to going grocery shopping for an elderly neighbour, or running around a muddy local park with a youth football team on a Saturday morning. It is therefore unsurprising that the Olympics legacy has not led to a significant increase in volunteering.

Instead of hanging our heads in shame and despairing over “a missed opportunity”, it’s time to focus on what we can learn from the Olympic Volunteer experience. This begins with looking at the way in which the staff at the Olympics engaged with their volunteers, which was remarkable.

From our forthcoming report on volunteering, we have identified two key examples of best practice from the Olympics which could be implemented within the third sector. The extent of planning that went into volunteer management at the Olympics created a strong foundation for the later success of the Game makers. This was a key lesson for the sector, highlighted by Rachael Bayley, Head of Volunteering Development at Save the Children:

 “The message that hasn’t really got out there is the amount of work that the Olympics central team put into planning for involving volunteers… [they] started that programme four years out prior to the Olympics. So every member of staff in the Olympic delivery body, LOCOG [London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games], had practical experience of managing volunteers and they had various rules in the way that worked.”

In order to fully capitalise on what volunteers have to offer, a charity has to invest a lot of time, money and expertise in volunteer management. However, before this can happen, volunteering must be taken seriously at senior level. These sentiments were echoed by other leading volunteer managers in the charity sector, who felt that the way in which the chief executive and senior management adopted volunteer management across the Olympic strategy was the key to their success. They took responsibility for the volunteers, they valued them and they celebrated their contribution.

Integrating volunteer management into and across the whole of a charity’s strategy is the key to developing strong volunteer support. To really maximise the use of volunteers, this management needs to sit at the same level of importance as fundraising, not just play second fiddle to it. By integrating some aspect of volunteer management into everybody’s role across the organisation, a charity can really make strides in attracting and utilising volunteers.

Another essential part of developing a strong volunteer presence within your charity is to make the role fit the volunteer. Making a volunteer role more exciting and mutually beneficial means the volunteer is likely to be more engaged and reliable. By creating a diverse range of roles and selling them in a similar way to a job vacancy, you are more likely to tap into a volunteer’s unique skill set.

Volunteering isn’t all about the numbers. A small amount of more engaged and committed volunteers are just as effective. This is what made the Olympics so successful. LOCOG tailored specific roles and let potential volunteers know specifically what they would be doing. This level of knowledge made people sign up and commit to the roles available.

As over 50,000 people applied for the 15,000 volunteer positions during the upcoming Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, it’s clear that volunteering hasn’t been forgotten about since the Olympics. So we must celebrate the enthusiasm of those who want to volunteer and not set ourselves unreasonable expectations about its legacy.