The Volunteering Impact Assessment Toolkit

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The Volunteering Impact Assessment Toolkit
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The rationale for impact assessment

• Demand from funders increasingly want to know
  what difference their funding makes
• Demand from organisations want to know what
  works and what could work better
• Demand from volunteers no one wants to give
  their time to something that has no impact
• In general, for accountability and organisational
  learning

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Introducing the Toolkit

• Looks at a range of stakeholders
• Volunteers
• Organisations
• Service users
• Wider community
• Considers a wide range of impacts
• Economic capital
• Physical capital
• Human capital
• Social capital
• Cultural capital
• Includes a series of adaptable research tools
• Provides guidelines on data collection and
  analysis

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What is Economic Capital?

• The economic effects of volunteering on all
  stakeholders, e.g. value of training received,
  changes in employability, value of work done by
  volunteers
• The most common measure for the impact of
  volunteering
• Usually looks at the monetary value of
  volunteers work through formula considering wage
  equivalent of time given
• e.g. no. volunteers X average no. of hours X
  average wage
• Also need to consider costs of volunteering
  management, recruitment, support, travel,
  accommodation, insurance

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What is Physical Capital?

• The things produced by volunteering
• Community centre built, number of training
  courses delivered, number of trees planted
• Need to consider not just quantity but also
  quality
• How sustainable are the outputs? How
  appropriate are they to the service users and
  local community?

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What is Human Capital?

• Personal development
• Changes in levels of confidence and self-esteem,
  changes in health and feelings of wellbeing
• Acquisition of skills
• Soft skills e.g. team work, communication,
  inter-personal
• Hard skills e.g. IT skills, construction,
  horticulture

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What is Social Capital?

• Looking beyond individual development to look at
  relationships, networks, bonds of trust between
  people and reciprocity
• These networks can help build more cohesive
  communities
• But need to be aware of the negative side of
  social capital when groups become too tightly
  knit and so exclude others

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What is Cultural Capital?

• Shared sense of cultural and religious identity,
  including language, heritage
• Volunteering can help to reinforce sense of
  cultural affiliation
• Volunteering may be guided by cultural and
  individual values, and in turn may affect
  peoples values and sense of identity
• Hardest to assess

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The Toolkit Process

• 1. Brainstorm what impacts you think volunteers
  have on your organisation, using the blank impact
  matrix as a template
• 2. Decide which stakeholder groups (volunteers,
  your organisation, users, wider community) and
  the impacts (physical capital, human capital,
  economic capital, social capital cultural
  capital) are a priority for you to measure. You
  may choose to go for the whole lot but it may be
  sensible to do a bit at a time
• 3. Decide which methods are most appropriate for
  you to use

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The Toolkit Process

• 4. Adapt the relevant sample questionnaires
  included on the CD ROM to suit your organisations
  requirements, and then pilot them
• 5. Undertake the research, using either
  quantitative or qualitative methods, or mix of
  the two
• 6. Analyse the results using the traffic light
  system where appropriate and think about possible
  implications