Measuring impact
It’s important to measure your impact to show how you are meeting any specific aims of your volunteer programme, review the quality of the volunteer’s experience, identify any areas of improvements and provide evidence to current and/or future funders.
Ways to show the impact
You can shout internally and externally to your group/organisation about volunteer contribution and the difference they make. But also don’t forget to show volunteers themselves the positive impact they have.
This can be done through:
Monitoring: the process for collecting the facts and figures related to your volunteer programme. This will include such things as:
- Numbers of volunteers
- Demographic information (age, ethnicity etc)
- Records showing how often and for how long people volunteer
- The type of activities volunteers do
- The economic value of volunteer’s contributions
- The costs of involving volunteers
Monitoring information can be used to evidence the things you do and the services you provide (Outputs).
Evaluation: involves using information you have collected to answer questions about how well the volunteer programme is doing, identifying any gaps and improvements you can make and to demonstrate your outcomes (the difference that involving volunteers makes). It will involve analysis of monitoring information (quantitative or “hard” data) and any feedback, case studies, volunteer experiences etc (qualitative or “soft” data).
Resources - Monitoring and Evaluation
- Directory of Social Change: Managing volunteers: Assessing the impact of your volunteers
The following are surveys/reports with data about volunteering that you may wish to refer to:
Monitoring diversity
In order to know how diverse your organisation currently is and how open you are to diversity generally, it’s recommended to set up collection and monitoring of diversity information. It’s common for organisations to use a monitoring form.
Forms should make it clear the information is confidential, and people are under no obligation to complete it. The forms should be kept separate from other personal information such as name and contact details. You should bear in mind to only include the questions relevant to the ground that you have decided to monitor on.
Collecting diversity information is just one part of the process; how you use that information is what really matters.
Resources - Monitoring Diversity
- The census is the main source of population data
NCVO Time Well Spent Reports (research programme on people’s experiences of volunteering):