Measuring Volunteering Impact

Time to Demonstrate Impact

Volunteering: Measuring Impact and Demonstrating Strategic Value of Volunteering

Volunteering managers, senior managers, CEOs, and directors often struggle to understand and demonstrate the strategic impact of volunteering. Operational managers may not understand the value of volunteers, and key staff may describe volunteering as unimportant. 

At Time for Impact, our consultants think demonstration of impact is critical to volunteering. We believe in designing in volunteering impact measurement from the very beginning of formulating volunteering strategies. By identifying and agreeing what the success measures will be at the outset you can tie volunteer activity more closely to organisation strategy and to the needs of your stakeholders. This can also demonstrate the case for investment. 

Only once you have shared understanding on what volunteering success looks like and how you will measure it, should you embark on new volunteering strategies. 

So often, volunteering is measured by limited measures such as numbers of volunteers recruited or hours given by volunteers. But these measures tell us little about the quality of the volunteering or its impact. Imagine if you only measured an employee's impact by the hours they worked. Would a more impactful employee necessarily work more hours? Of course not. So why would this be the case for volunteers?

Another thorny issue is attributing a financial value to volunteering. Whilst we all know this can sometimes be useful in seeking funding or support, in truth, it is extremely difficult to put a financial value on volunteering time. In so doing, how do you decide on the hourly rate you would be paying these volunteers if they were staff? How do you for example put a value on the lived experience many volunteers bring?

At Time for Impact,  we take a balanced scorecard approach to identifying the full impact that volunteers bring to your mission and strategy. This allows us to look at a much more rounded understanding of the value your volunteers do or will bring. 

Traditional balanced scorecards focus on financial returns, customer service, learning and growth, and delivery of quality processes. At Time for Impact we amend these depending on customer need.  For example, we add measures of community as well as customer impact.

We believe that agreeing these outcomes up front with directors and the Board is essential. It aids the creation of shared understanding on what you are seeking to achieve through volunteering.

Once these are agreed we can help you design the volunteering strategy, plans, stakeholder management and impact measurement mechanisms.

For more information on how we can help you demonstrate volunteer impact please contact us .