What a scheme costs
A mentoring or befriending scheme costs £700 to £2,500 per active match per year, all in, and 60% to 80% of that is coordination rather than the volunteering itself.
A coordinator writing a budget or a funding bid for a one to one scheme, and anybody who has been asked to set one up on the assumption that volunteers make it cheap. It is also for a volunteer who wants to know whether they will be out of pocket.
The coordinator post. Coordination is the majority of what a match costs, and it is the line that gets cut first because it is the only line that looks like overhead rather than delivery.
A scheme is funded for two years, recruits more volunteers than one part-time coordinator can supervise, and stops being safe some months before it stops running. Underfunding a scheme does not produce a smaller scheme, it produces an unsupervised one.
Where a scheme sits inside that band depends on four things: how complex its referrals are, whether the coordinator is full-time, whether volunteers travel to visit people, and how long matches are expected to run. There is no national price index for volunteer mentoring or befriending in the United Kingdom, so every figure here is a working range rather than survey data, and any scheme quoting one should say the same.
| Type of scheme | Cost per active match per year | Why it sits there |
|---|---|---|
| Light-touch telephone befriending | £700 to £1,200 | No travel, no venue, lower risk assessment burden, larger caseload per coordinator |
| Youth mentoring with a referred young person | £1,500 to £2,500 | Enhanced checks, longer training, closer supervision, a twelve month commitment and school or agency liaison |
| Any scheme, the full band | £700 to £2,500 | The width is the difference between those two models, not uncertainty about the cost |
Why the volunteer hour is the cheap part
The volunteer hour is the part of the model that is given rather than bought, and it is also the part that carries the risk, which is the whole reason the rest of the money exists. The ask is modest: about an hour a week for mentoring, an hour a week or an hour a fortnight for befriending, and a telephone befriending call of twenty to forty-five minutes weekly. Over a year that is a real contribution of time and it is not the thing the money buys.
What the money buys is everything that makes that hour safe to offer: recruiting the volunteer, taking up references, running the criminal record check, training them, matching them to the right person, supervising them monthly, reading their logs, holding the safeguarding phone, keeping the records for years afterwards, and closing the match properly at the end. Take those away and there is no scheme, only two strangers and a hope.
Volunteers are not free labour. They are a delivery model with an overhead, and the overhead is the scheme. Any budget that shows a large number of matches and a small coordination line is describing something that will not run.
What one coordinator can actually hold
One full-time coordinator can hold 30 to 50 active matches, and fewer where referrals are complex. That single ratio does more work in a budget than any other number on this page, because it converts an ambition into a staffing cost. A scheme aiming for 80 live matches needs two coordinators, not one enthusiastic one, and a scheme with 40 matches held by somebody working two days a week is not a lean scheme, it is an unsupervised one.
Three things push the caseload towards the lower end: home visiting rather than telephone or public-place meetings, referrals that arrive with existing safeguarding involvement, and a high rate of match breakdown, which consumes coordinator time in both directions. Three things push it higher: telephone delivery, stable long-running matches, and volunteers recruited in cohorts rather than one at a time.
The funding arrives for the matches but not for the coordination
The coordinator writes down, before accepting, how many matches the funded time can supervise at the stated ratio, and says no to the surplus in writing rather than absorbing it. The scheme reduces the number of matches rather than the frequency of supervision, because the second option is invisible until it fails. Where the funder will not move, the honest answer is a smaller scheme, and it is a better answer than a larger one nobody is watching.
The lines a budget has to contain
A budget for a one to one scheme contains eight lines, and the first is the one that is always missed:
- Coordinator time, costed as a real post with on-costs, at 60% to 80% of total scheme cost.
- Volunteer recruitment and induction, including references and criminal record checks.
- Volunteer training, both initial and refresher.
- Volunteer expenses, reimbursed in full and promptly.
- Insurance, covering public liability and volunteers as well as staff.
- Case management, whether that is a database subscription or the time to keep records properly.
- Venue or telephone costs, depending on the delivery model.
- Evaluation, which is coordinator time by another name and disappears if it is not named.
Two of those lines have no figure on this site, on purpose. Criminal record check fees are set by the bodies that run them and change: checks are free of charge for volunteers who meet the Disclosure and Barring Service definition of a volunteer, though an umbrella body may still charge its own administration fee, and paid-staff fees are set by the DBS. Scotland works through PVG scheme membership with Disclosure Scotland, and Northern Ireland through AccessNI, each with its own arrangements. Check the current fee with the relevant body rather than with a guidance page. Insurance premiums are the second: they depend on the activity, the numbers and the insurer, and no published figure will match a particular scheme.
What a given number of matches costs to run
The bands are the working ranges in the table above. This does the arithmetic, it does not price your scheme: where you sit inside a band depends on how complex your referrals are and whether the coordinator is full time.
Volunteer expenses, which are a duty and not a gesture
Volunteer expenses are reimbursed in full, promptly, and without the volunteer having to ask twice. A scheme that quietly relies on volunteers absorbing their own bus fares has introduced a means test into its recruitment, and it will end up with the volunteers who can afford to be unpaid rather than the ones who suit the work. Reimburse travel, including car use at the approved mileage rate published by HMRC, which should be checked for the current rate rather than assumed, along with parking, the cost of a coffee bought during a session, and any telephone costs where the volunteer uses their own phone by agreement.
Reimbursement of actual expenses is not payment, and a scheme should keep it that way. Round-sum allowances, honoraria and gift vouchers can change a volunteer’s status and create tax and employment questions the scheme is not equipped to answer. Pay receipts, not amounts.
The volunteer
- Claims expenses rather than absorbing them, and claims them monthly.
- Keeps receipts and a simple mileage record.
- Agrees any unusual cost with the coordinator before spending it.
- Buys nothing significant for the person supported, and lends them no money.
The person supported
- Pays nothing for the service, and is told so plainly at the first meeting.
- Is never asked to cover the volunteer’s travel, parking or refreshments.
- Is not asked for a donation by the volunteer, at any point.
- Can raise a concern about money directly with the scheme, not through the volunteer.
The scheme budgets the coordinator post first and the match numbers second, reimburses expenses within a stated number of days, insures the volunteers as well as the staff, and tells funders the true unit cost rather than the flattering one. It also refuses the arithmetic that treats donated hours as saved money: the hours are given, the scheme around them is bought, and only one of those appears on an invoice.
A funder asks for the cost per hour of mentoring
The coordinator answers with the cost per active match per year instead, and explains why: the cost of this model does not sit in the contact hour, it sits in the coordination that surrounds it, so a per-hour figure makes a well-supervised scheme look expensive and an unsupervised one look efficient. Commercial coaching and professional mentoring are priced by the hour and are a different market entirely. Quoting their rates for a volunteer scheme, in either direction, produces a number that describes nothing.