Sport tools for measuring volunteer impact
Do you have volunteer shortages? Does your sport rely on a few keen volunteers to do almost everything? Do your volunteers receive the right training?
The report , "A winning team?", shows the results of the pilot of these sport tools. It reveals opportunities for improving the experience of volunteers in sport: with frustrations about volunteer shortages, excessive reliance on key individuals and lack of training emerging as areas of concern.
These experiences are not new: similar results were reported in the 2002 research by Sport England into sport volunteering.
The difference with this project is the new tools now allow individual sport organisations to assess their own volunteering impacts, enabling them to shout loudly or make any improvements.
The report makes a number of recommendations to address these experiences, including:
- Encouraging clubs to create a volunteer co-ordinator position rather than spreading responsibility too generally
- Promoting “softer” management practices such as mentoring and buddying
- Developing links between sport organisations and volunteering infrastructure bodies such as Volunteer Centres
- Better monitoring of individuals’ workloads, delegation and division of tasks
- Reimbursing volunteers’ expenses to enable people on low incomes to volunteer
Below are four tools for sport organisations to use that can help assess the impact of your volunteers.
For a fuller assessment of volunteers, you can buy the generic Volunteering Impact Assessment Toolkit from Volunteering England.
