Improving the volunteer experience, boosting engagement, and strengthening community impact
About Flutterbye
If your organisation involves volunteers, you already know how much rides on getting the program right. Recruitment, retention, safety, engagement: each one shapes the experience volunteers have and the impact they make. Flutterbye helps you get it right.
What started in 2016 as a volunteer management blog grew into a consultancy after readers kept asking the same question. Can you help us actually do this? The answer was yes then. It still is now.
Flutterbye’s name and logo draw inspiration from the humble butterfly. Small acts by individual volunteers add up to immeasurable benefits for the community, an example of the butterfly effect. Likewise, small, deliberate changes to a volunteer program can ripple into something much bigger: stronger retention, safer programs, more engaged volunteers and real outcomes for the community. The butterfly effect, applied to volunteering.
And the name itself; Christine’s two year old daughter couldn’t pronounce butterfly correctly and instead said Flutterbye
Why choose us
Results
I give volunteer-involving organisations the confidence to make good decisions, the clarity to act on them, and the capability to keep going after
I leave.
Clients describe it as knowing they’re in good hands. Complex problems become structured and workable. Costly mistakes get avoided before they land.
The outcome is a volunteer program that reduces risk, runs on systems that work, and delivers impact you can measure and defend. Your coordinator stops drowning in admin and starts leading. Your leadership team has the evidence to keep investing
in volunteers.
Experience
More than 20 years in volunteer leadership. Seven years consulting exclusively in Australia and New Zealand, across over 55 organisations, from small community groups to state government and peak bodies.
Most clients return for a second or third engagement. That repeat rate is the quietest proof of what works.
I have keynoted at Volunteering Victoria and Volunteering New Zealand conferences and contributed to global sector publications, including
Engage Journal.
The work, whether a Better Impact review, a National Standards audit, or a full volunteer management framework, is built around your organisation’s specific situation.
When I walk into your organisation, I have seen your problem before. More than once.
Care
I left a graphic design career at 25 after a month volunteering with disadvantaged children in Thailand. I came home and have worked in volunteering ever since.
That is not a career pivot story. It is a values story.
I still volunteer today. Plasma through Red Cross. Time at my children’s school. This work is not separate from who I am.
When I sit with your team, I am not just solving a systems problem. I am thinking about the volunteers whose experience depends on getting this right. I am thinking about the coordinator who keeps showing up even when the systems make it harder than it needs to be. And I am thinking about the people your volunteers serve when the program runs the way
it should.
That is why the structure I build does not leave when I do.
Your volunteering expert
Meet our Director
Hello, I’m Christine Spiers, a Volunteer Engagement Strategist based in Melbourne. For more than 20 years I have designed, led and improved volunteer programs across not-for-profit organisations and local government. Since 2019 I have worked with more than 55 organisations across Australia and New Zealand as an independent consultant.
I hold a rare set of qualifications for this field: Certified in Volunteer Administration (CVA), Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, Certified Practising Change Manager (Prosci), Certificate of Engagement (IAP2), Training and Assessment and Certified Better Impact Consultant.
What that means for you: I bring both the evidence base and the lived experience of actually running volunteer programs. You bring the knowledge of your community and your team. Together we build something that holds.
If you’re stuck on a volunteering challenge, planning a review or quietly wondering whether your program is set up the way it should be, get in touch. The first conversation costs nothing and often shifts the thinking before any work begins. Let’s connect.
