The Institute for Volunteering Research has embarked on a project to help gauge the impact of volunteering in the NHS. The project will involve assisting eight NHS Trusts to carry out their own impact asssessments of volunteering. This will lead to a final report which will enable other Trusts to undertake impact assessments using a proven methodology.
Volunteers are involved in every facet of society, donating millions of hours to community work. Many organisations could not exist without the involvement of people giving freely of their time. And yet talk of impact is often limited to counting the number of people who volunteer or counting the activities volunteers contribute to -how many people matched in befriending projects or how many hours a friends shop is open for example.
Over the past three years the Institute has developed a Volunteer Impact Assessment Toolkit to take the measurement of volunteer impacts a stage further to try to discover more about what difference involving volunteers makes. The toolkit has been available to organisations for the past year and many have used it successfully to investigate more about their volunteers.
This project is working with eight NHS Trusts to apply the toolkit in the NHS.
Why measure impact?
Organisations want to look at impacts for a number of reasons, chief among them are:
- Providing hard data to senior managers, boards and trustees of the value of supporting volunteering;
- Providing information about the additional or unexpected benefits that involving volunteers can bring to the organisation;
- The demand from funders who increasingly want to know what difference their funding makes;
- The demand from organisations that want to know what works in managing volunteers, and what could work better;
- The demand from volunteers, it has been said that ‘no one wants to give their time to something that has no impact’ and demonstrating to volunteers that their contribution is making a difference is a real help in recruiting and retaining volunteers;
In general, for accountability and organisational learning.
What does the toolkit cover?
The toolkit has been developed to be used by volunteer involving organisations. It is a comprehensive document that breaks down stakeholder groups and considers a wider range of impacts.
Stakeholders
A whole range of stakeholders are affected by volunteering, the toolkit groups these into:
- Volunteers
- Organisations
- Service users
- Wider community
Impacts
The list of possible impacts is endless. The toolkit divides them into capitals – this is simply a way of thinking about how the stock of something is added to through volunteering. They are:
- Economic capital – for example how does volunteering help people into paid work and what is volunteers’ time worth to an NHS trust?
- Physical capital – what do volunteers produce? More services that would not have gone ahead without them?
- Human capital – how does volunteering add to skills and learning for staff, volunteers, patients and others?
- Social capital - what relationships, networks, bonds of trust between people are developed through volunteer involvement?
- Cultural capital – how does volunteering strengthen shared sense of cultural and religious identity, including language and heritage?
Tools
The toolkit provides questionnaires, discussion guides, a Volunteer Investment Value Audit template to assess economic impact and other tools to help organisations think about measuring impact
The project
This project will run for 18 months and will cover a diverse range of NHS Trusts, including Acute Hospitals, Primary Care, Mental Health Trusts and an Ambulance Trust. The Institute help each Trust in designing the impact assessment to meet their own requirements. The Institute will also work to train the trusts in using the toolkit and support them throughout their own impact assessments. This might include customising the toolkit questionnaires, providing detailed advice on which stakeholders should be included, and data analysis.
