Impact round-up: Spring 2023

Over a quarter of people in England volunteer formally at least once a year. Many charities both big and small rely heavily on volunteers to carry out their work.

So how can the sector evaluate the impact of volunteering programmes and share the stories of volunteers? Here are our tips.

You can use national research and data as a source of indicators or questions to help measure volunteering outcomes and experiences.

It can also be useful to compare your data with national benchmarks.

• Time Well Spent is NCVOs research series focusing on the volunteer experience. The most recent publication looks at how volunteering has transformed over recent years. This includes the impact of the pandemic, the cost of living crisis and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
• The Community Life Survey is a national annual survey covering social cohesion, community engagement and social action. It’s the most comprehensive source of data for volunteering and charitable giving.

There are various methodologies which aim to put a monetary value on social outcomes or initiatives such as volunteering.

• Nesta’s Valuing People Power: Final Report (pdf, 1.3MB) delves into the economic and social value of volunteering and unpaid activities in the UK.
• Office for National Statistics earnings and working hours data can be used to carry out quick calculations of the economic value of your volunteers’ time.
• The Local Government Association’s Social Value Easy Guide (pdf, 775KB) sets out how smaller organisations can use the National Social Value Measurement framework to quantify the social value they create.
• Cost benefit analysis is a more complex methodology which can be used to assess the economic value of interventions such as volunteering programmes. However, you need to be very clear about the outcomes of the programme. For example, the programme could result in a volunteer gaining employment.

Storytelling and case studies are some of the most powerful ways you can share the impact of your volunteers.

We’re motivated and moved by authentic human stories more than numbers and figures. It’s important to remember that volunteers are people, not just a resource to be mined or a way to save money.

• This blog all the way from New Zealand explores the link between storytelling and volunteer recruitment.
• Case studies focus on a person, place or project. They can be a particularly compelling way to share your volunteer experiences, as long as you tell authentic stories, not just the best bits! The Better Evaluation website has a guide to developing better case studies for evaluation.

Our in-house evaluation and volunteering consultants support organisations to develop volunteering programmes and measure their impact.

Below are examples of current and recent volunteering project evaluations.

• We’re delivering and evaluating Active Kindness in partnership with Community Leisure UK and Sport England. Active Kindness is a multi-year project designed to build volunteering capacity in the leisure sector. Read our interim evaluation report
• We recently delivered and evaluated Age Friendly Inclusive Volunteering, a project funded by the Centre for Ageing Better. The project aimed to address challenges to engaging older and diverse volunteers. Take a look at our key insights from the project (pdf, 867 KB).