How to measure the impact of employee volunteering
From a guide by Submittable
A volunteering programme can be transformational for employees, community members, and your business. Companies should measure the health and impact of every programme.
The health of a volunteer programme and its impact are not the same thing. The health of a programme is the stability and efficacy of your volunteer programme. In essence, do people know about your programme? Are they showing up to volunteer? Does your programme have the technical, structural, and human support to run effectively? Your goal is for your volunteer programme to be self-sustaining. The impact of your programme is the effect your programme has on employees, community members, and your company. It’s how your programme is making a difference in the world. This goes beyond whether your programme is running well and gets at the meaningful outcomes born out of this work.
To measure your programme’s impact, think about it across four categories: employees, company, community, and non-profits. Within each of these categories, you need clear goals about what you want to achieve.
1. Impact on employees
Volunteering can have a profound effect on employees both personally and professionally. On a basic human level, it feels good to give back. People actually have a positive biological response to volunteering. And this “helper’s high” is not fleeting. In fact it can alter how people feel about themselves over the long term. One Harvard report found that “higher levels of volunteer work were associated with higher levels of
overall life satisfaction.”.
Not only does volunteering make employees feel more fulfilled, it gives them a venue to develop skills and strengthen connections. It’s a safe space to take on new challenges and try on leadership roles. One study found that 40–45% of the employee volunteers reported improvement
in leadership, mentorship, motivating others, project management, and public speaking and presenting. Plus, volunteering can improve cross-team communication, as employees who don’t often work together get the chance to collaborate.
2. Impact on the company
A volunteer program is an important component in building a strong brand and company culture. As part of a broader CSR strategy, volunteering helps your company become a trusted brand both for customers and potential employees. People want to support businesses that see themselves as active members of the community. In fact, a recent report found that 77% of consumers support brands who share their values.
Internally, volunteering helps you build a company culture that centres empathy and accountability. You’re showing employees that you’re willing to invest in making the world a better place. This commitment will help you recruit and retain employees. In fact, employees who volunteer are 32% less likely to churn.
3. Impact on the community
The whole point of volunteer work is to dedicate one of your company’s best resources—your people—to help solve problems within the community. The hours your team puts into volunteering can directly improve the lives of community members.
There’s a huge range of possibilities here, depending on where you focus your efforts. Direct service work—whether it’s cooking meals, providing mentorship, improving a public space, or something else—increases access to services and improves quality of life for real people. Plus, as employees get involved, some will naturally become advocates who use their voices to raise awareness about community needs.
4. Impact on non-profits
Lending the power of your team to a non-profit increases their organization’s capacity and improves their ability to be more effective over the long term. Volunteers can take on the day-to-day duties that pull the non-profit staff away from deeper, more strategic work.
A projection from United Way estimated that, in the USA, if each company with the largest revenue headquartered in (or with a major office in) each state implemented one day of volunteer time off, it would add 75 million volunteer hours—that’s 9 million days—to the non-profit capacity. That capacity not only saves non-profits money in payroll, but gives their employees the bandwidth. Plus, a partnership with your company can give the non-profit more exposure and name recognition within the local community.
So what and how to measure?
Start by incorporating plans for measurement from the beginning. Clarify what you hope to achieve and then tie your measurement strategy directly to those goals.
1. Use resources and data that already exists
You can rely on the reporting structures that already exist within your company such as employee and customer surveys, retention metrics, and other HR resources. These will give you a starting point to understand how your program affects employees, company culture, and the brand as a whole. Also look for impact reports from the non-profit organizations you partner with to understand the outcomes your program supports.
2. Ask people directly
People are at the centre of volunteer work. Getting their direct feedback provides essential insight into how your programme moves the needle on the individual level.
3. Use a control group
To understand the true impact of your volunteer programme, it helps if you have something to compare against. Odds are, not all of your employees will participate in volunteering. Comparing retention and engagement metrics between those who get involved and those who don’t can give you a sense of how your volunteer programme influences these outcomes.
4. Connect your contributions to larger efforts
It’s highly unlikely that your volunteer programme will single-handedly solve a community problem. That’s not the intention. What you want is for your contributions to align with broader efforts to make meaningful, long-term change. Seek to understand what’s happening in the community. Look at the organizations working to solve the similar or related problems. Do your efforts align with theirs? Are you duplicating efforts in a way that diminishes your impact? What unique strength does your programme bring to the table? Are there gaps in services or access you can identify?
5. Tie activities to outputs and outcomes
When it comes to volunteering, measuring activities can be an appealing way to start because they are easy to measure. You can think of it as the hours employees put into volunteering. But the whole point of volunteering is not what goes into volunteering, but what comes out of it. First, you want to tie those activities to outputs. What does a volunteer create? It could be tangible things such as a meal, a packed box of school supplies, or a clean space. To take it a step further, seek to link the outputs to outcomes. What does that meal or box of supplies actually mean? How does it have an impact on real people? Naturally, tracking outcomes takes a bit more effort than tracking activities. Then you are able to tell a more complete story of your impact. Rather than saying your volunteers packed 100 boxes of school supplies, you can highlight what having those supplies meant on an individual level.
Download the full guide here.
Retweet about this article:
From a guide by Submittable, 31/01/2024