GoVo Roadmap
Launching to volunteers in October 2025, GoVo is a new digital volunteering platform being built by Royal Voluntary Service.
Developed thanks to support from players of People’s Postcode Lottery, GoVo aims to unlock the potential of volunteering, for everyone, everywhere, making it frictionless and accessible for all
GoVo will help:
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Charities of all sizes reach more volunteers, while reducing time spent on admin
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Volunteers find meaningful opportunities that fit around their lives
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Businesses power and track the impact of their volunteering programmes by easily matching employees to suitable roles (coming later in 2025.)
This is our current roadmap, which takes us through to the end of 2026.
Our vision
Volunteering is more important than ever, but since the pandemic, participation has been in steady decline. Meanwhile, over 140 million employee volunteering hours go unused each year, as businesses struggle to connect people with the right opportunities.
There’s a clear opportunity to close this gap.
With GoVo our goal is simple: to make volunteering easy for everyone - flexible, inclusive and accessible to all – and help build a stronger, more connected and kinder Britain.
By bringing charities, volunteers and businesses together on a single digital platform, GoVo unlocks volunteering potential, reduces friction and empowers people and businesses to turn good intentions into meaningful action.
GoVo’s founding principles
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Frictionless
GoVo aims to remove friction from volunteering. The ‘on-board once’ feature allows volunteers to register once to support multiple causes. Volunteer details are passported across charities, making it easier for people to give their time to more causes and reducing admin for charities.
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Flexible
GoVo promotes a wide range of roles to suit different schedules, interests and skills, helping charities attract more diverse volunteers. It enables people to give their time in ways that work for them, while making it easier for employees to find roles that meet their criteria.
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Accessible
GoVo is designed to engage underrepresented groups and accommodate all volunteers. Accessibility features are in-built and constantly improving, so everyone feels welcome.
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Interoperable
GoVo aims to integrate into existing solutions in the sector, seeking the best approach to improve volunteering as a whole. Our open API supports this directly, and we are always looking for more partners.
What we've built so far
You can find out about what has been built in GoVo so far on our release notes. We normally release every two weeks.
What we’re working on
Built with a user-first mindset, GoVo will adapt and improve through continuous development. This roadmap acts as a guide for where we are taking GoVo. It explains what is being built, what problems we want to tackle, and why it matters.
How to engage with the roadmap
The roadmap isn’t to just tell people what’s going on - it is there to help start conversations about how we want to improve GoVo.
Questions & feedback
Feel free to send us any feedback. If there’s something that’s not on the roadmap that you think should be, please raise it, even if it’s just a vague idea you have. If might be that we have already considered it, but hearing additional voices always helps inform decisions, and often an item not being on the roadmap is a “not yet” rather than a “never”.
Focus areas
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Volunteering
Making it easier to support the causes you care about. Fully accessible, GoVo is designed to inspire action, helping volunteers find opportunities that suit them.
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Charities
Reach and recruit more volunteers. GoVo is being developed for the sector, by the sector. To date, 400 charities have engaged, shared feedback, contributed to focus groups and attended workshops and webinars.
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Businesses
GoVo helps unlock untapped volunteering potential and supports the scaling of employee volunteering programmes. Employee volunteering has been shown to boost wellbeing, enhance skills and drive productivity, while also supporting local communities and advancing ESG goals and social value targets.
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Core platform
These are core features on the platform that improve the experience generally, for all users. These include things like a better search experience, or an improved API.
What we're working on
Volunteers
- We’re working on launching Govo - at release volunteers will be able to register, search for opportunities based on location, type, and times
- Volunteers will get identity checked, a key part of the volunteering process - but they will just need to do this once for GoVo.
- Volunteers will be able to match with opportunities, starting their volunteering journey
Charities
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Launching GoVo! Charities can register on the platform, listing information about the charity, and post volunteering opportunities via spreadsheet upload or an API, including information on times and locations.
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Charities will be able to get matches with volunteers, getting access to a wider pool for volunteers.
Businesses
- Initial business features - register and sign-in via an SSO, corporate admin and team management, and basic business data reporting. These will come a bit after launch.
Core platform
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Open API - this can be used for things like charities integrating directly with GoVo, better supporting existing systems that they might have.
Coming up next
Volunteers
- Capturing task completion - in order to have better data on the impact GoVo is having, we need to check in with volunteers on if the volunteering activity took place. We’ll be releasing something for this shortly after launch.
Charities
- Basic reporting - we want charities to have better visibility on what activity and engagement they are getting on GoVo. We’ll be releasing some basic reports shortly post launch.
Businesses
- Business team days - many business have said that they need support for team days, where groups of employees can take part in the same volunteering activity at the same time.
Core platform
- Post launch polish - we expect a lot of feedback on GoVo right after launch. We will be ready to act on it.
- Search improvements - our longer term vision for search is a highly intelligent experience where a person can type in what they want to do, in natural language, and get great matches back. Getting to this will take time, so we will constantly be working towards this.
- Improved Welsh language support - we’re launching with Welsh language support via ReciteMe, but we want to further improve this in order to better support Welsh charities.
In the future - 2026
Volunteers
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Skills profile - in order to enable more skills-based volunteering, allowing volunteers to list their skills will help us match them to opportunities where those skills are needed.
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Passporting - having a more robust set of verifications for volunteers will remove more friction from a charity’s volunteer onboarding. DBS checks in GoVo will be a part of this.
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Nurturing additional volunteering - we want to use data insights from GoVo to understand what keeps people coming back for more opportunities, building an experience where we encourage this.
Charities
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Better support for infrastructure organisations - we will have a series of working group meetings at the start of 2026 to look at this.
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Hierarchical charities - major charities often have a local/national branch structure. We will improve how we have charities in GoVo to better support this.
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Community groups - we would like to support volunteering activity on GoVo beyond charities. This will be closely linked to the infrastructure working groups above.
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Improving charity onboarding/opportunity upload - once charities are using GoVo as a part of their normal operations, we can use those experience to improve the onboarding and the day-to-day opportunity uploads.
Businesses
- Business-specific opportunities - some businesses partner with charities where they have bespoke volunteering opportunities.
- Business policy filtering - some businesses have policies that limit certain volunteering activities, like driving.
- Impact reporting - being able to report on the social impact of volunteering activity is crucial to advancing ESG goals. We will be partnering with a social impact reporting company to provide this.
Core platform
- Search improvements - we’re constantly improving the search on GoVo, as it is the heart of the platform.
- Reporting improvements - data insights will improve the platform, and improving these for charities and businesses will mean they can improve how they offer and engage in volunteering as well.
- Task capture improvements - asking volunteers about activity is a good start, but we want to look for additional ways to capture how much volunteering has been actually done as a result of GoVo matches.
- Standard integrations with major VMS systems - integrating directly with VMS systems will reduce friction for volunteering onboarding and opportunity management.