Build a volunteer handbook that gives your organisation one clear reference point

A handbook is often useful where your organisation has multiple volunteers, recurring activities or a need for consistent rules across different roles. An agreement usually deals with the individual relationship, while a handbook can bring together the wider expectations volunteers need to follow, such as conduct, safety procedures, confidentiality, communications and reporting lines. It is particularly helpful for charities, clubs and community groups that onboard people regularly or run events and programmes where volunteers need one central reference point rather than scattered documents.

The main risk is usually inconsistency. Without a handbook, volunteers may receive different instructions from different staff members, or important expectations may only exist informally. That can create confusion around safety, behaviour, confidentiality, social media use, reimbursements, complaints or who to contact when something goes wrong. A handbook helps bring those points together in one place. It does not solve every operational issue on its own, but it gives your organisation a clearer written framework to support onboarding and day-to-day volunteer management.

This service usually includes drafting or updating a volunteer handbook and working through the policies and practical sections that should sit inside it. Depending on your organisation, that may include conduct expectations, health and safety points, confidentiality, role boundaries, onboarding information, communication channels, complaints pathways and other volunteer-facing rules. We can also review existing volunteer materials if you already have them. The work is broader than a single agreement, but it is still centred on the handbook rather than ongoing management of the programme after the document is completed.

A handbook is usually a collection point for several rules and guidance notes, rather than one narrow legal document. For example, a volunteer agreement may set out the relationship with an individual volunteer, while a safeguarding or conduct policy may deal with one specific topic. A handbook can bring those strands together in a format volunteers can actually use during onboarding and throughout their role. That broader structure is why this service differs from a narrower document-only page. It is about the overall volunteer reference document, not just one clause set.

After the handbook is completed, most organisations move to rollout. That usually means deciding how the handbook will be issued, whether volunteers need to acknowledge it, and whether related documents such as agreements, codes of conduct or safeguarding materials need to be aligned. You may also want to update induction steps so the handbook is actually used in practice. If your current documents overlap or conflict, we can flag that during the project. Ongoing implementation support beyond the handbook itself would usually be handled as separate work.

Just submit an enquiry via this page or click the 'get started' button on our website to submit an enquiry. After you've submitted an enquiry, one of our legal consultants will review your enquiry within 1 business day and get in touch to get a better idea of exactly what you are looking for.

Then your legal consultant will send through an email with a bit more information about the services you need, along with a fixed fee quote setting out costs, scope of the service and timing. Have a read through it, and if you're happy with the scope, you can accept and sign our engagement letter online - easy!

Once you've formally accepted, we'll connect you with a specialist lawyer and they will work with you to complete your project. They will contact you by email or phone if they need to get in touch.

Sprintlaw works on fixed-fee pricing wherever possible, so you can review the scope and cost before you decide whether to proceed. For the Volunteer Handbook service, pricing starts from $900.00.

After you enquire, a legal consultant will confirm what is included, the expected timing and whether any extra work is needed before you engage us.

We operate completely online, which means we can help you wherever you are in New Zealand. We have office spaces in Sydney, and in Melbourne, but our use of technology allows our team members to work remotely from around the world. Our legal team are mostly based in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. We also have a London office for Sprintlaw UK.

Our legal team is made up of experienced lawyers, who are specialists in various areas of law and hold an Australian legal practising certificate. None of our Sprintlaw lawyers are New Zealand qualified lawyers and they do not currently hold a New Zealand practising certificate.

They provide legal services working remotely from Australia via our 'legal consultancy' model, through which (under section 6 and section 35 of the New Zealand Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006) our Australian legal team are permitted to provide legal services to New Zealand businesses provided they do not provide services in certain 'reserved' areas of law. You can read our FAQ page to learn a bit more about our 'legal consultancy' model.

Given the strong similarities between Australian and New Zealand law, and the areas of law in which we practice (being small business and startup law), we do not view the fact that our lawyers have not qualified in New Zealand as having any substantive impact on the quality of our service. We are committed to ensuring that we provide high quality, affordable legal services to all our New Zealand clients.

Our legal team have all trained at leading firms, but have left the traditional corporate law world to join us on our mission to create a new and better way of delivering legal services. They have specialist expertise in technology law, intellectual property law, contract drafting and review, corporate law and commercial law.