Heritage volunteering in Scotland

In 2025, our National Strategy Team worked in partnership with Make Your Mark and Volunteer Scotland to deliver research which helps us to understand the current status of heritage volunteering in Scotland. 

Over 50 volunteer-involving heritage organisations and over 300 heritage volunteers responded to the survey. Key findings include:

• Volunteers are critical to the heritage sector, and heritage volunteering supports individual wellbeing and community development: 91% of respondents stated that volunteering improved their wellbeing and that it supported their skills development (82%). 

• Heritage volunteering supports people to develop valuable skills, but not the skills most needed by the sector. The skills developed by volunteers include visitor engagement and education (11%), communication (11%), teamwork (9%) and interpersonal skills (8%). However, far fewer volunteers felt their activity developed traditional and craft skills (1%), leadership and management (3%) or digital skills (4%).  

• Organisational capacity to manage and grow volunteering is limited, with only 18% of organisations surveyed having dedicated volunteer management roles. 

• Volunteer-involving heritage organisations are currently meeting the vast majority of their volunteers’ needs, according to the respondents, but the report highlights that more can be done to include marginalised people in volunteering. For example, few organisations provided travel (6%), equipment (4%) and childcare (0%) expenses, and accessibility provisions such as quiet spaces (3%), period products (3%) and hearing loops (1%) were also limited.  

The report sets out recommendations for three parts of the sector (heritage organisations, sector support bodies and funders), with the main themes being providing flexibility and support for volunteers, facilitating skills and career development, and increasing investment in volunteers and infrastructure. 

The findings provide an update to our Volunteering and the Historic Environment report, produced in 2016 in collaboration with Volunteer Scotland and the Built Environment Forum Scotland (BEFS).