I had an insightful talk about measuring impact with a friend recently. It wasn’t about volunteering but a comment she made hit home. She said “After a while, the measurements themselves start to seem more important than why we’re measuring them.” In other words, it’s more important to meet certain arbitrary numbers than it is to understand what needs to be measured and why.
Patty has a marketing business. It frustrates her to no end to see her clients getting upset because the number of people who are coming to their website is going down – even though the number of clients they have is going up! “What are they after? New clients or fame?? It’s more important to have the right people showing up than having a lot of people that will never hire you or buy from you,” she grumbles.
We’re not much better. We worry when the number of volunteers or volunteer hours goes down, even if the mission is still being advanced at the same or a higher rate. At that point, stressing over the number of hours is tantamount to saying that efficiency is bad!
Now, I’m not saying don’t measure things. We need to. Measurement is how we judge progress against key milestones. The measurements that matter, though, are those that show actual impact. Hours don’t do that.
Most advice you get about measuring impact in volunteer programs tells you to lean into the qualitative.
Which is important, but Boards and funders tend to like numbers along with stories and quotes. So where do you get those numbers if you don’t use volunteers and hours?
Start with your mission. Below are three missions that I’ve pulled from random websites.
- “Our mission is to enhance the quality of life for people facing life-limiting illness, death and bereavement through patient and family-centred care, education, research and advocacy.”
- “Our mission: to build a global community that takes meaningful action to protect and restore our ocean.”
- “Our mission is to feed people experiencing hunger today while working to end hunger for tomorrow.”
So if one of these was your mission, what would you need to measure to show a volunteer’s impact?
Well, the key to the first mission is “enhance the quality of life” for their clients. How would you measure enhanced quality of life? In a hospice setting, I’m guessing that that quality of life revolves around three things: psychological well-being, social connections and physical comfort. There are objective tools around measuring each of those available online. For example, for social connections, the University of Queensland has created a Social Identity Mapping tool. There are others out there for measuring psychological well-being and physical comfort. No doubt there are others that suit your mission. You just need to look at your mission, determine the measurement, then find the tool.
But there’s more to it than just measuring where things are now.
Snapshot measurements are useful, but you want to show that those measurements are improving over each reporting period. For that to happen, and to show that the volunteer program is what is causing it to happen, everything that a volunteer is tasked to do should, in some way, lead to an improvement in those numbers. Take the second example. The key there, I believe, is “a global community that takes meaningful action”. So what are the meaningful actions that need to be taken? And how would those actions be measured? Number of tons of plastic removed from shorelines and water? More companies using sustainable fishing practices? What tasks would you assign to a volunteer to improve those specific numbers?
And show the trends. Are the numbers trending in the right direction? And how can that be tied to volunteer involvement?
Finally, educate people on why certain statistics mean more than others.
To paraphrase Patty, what do people want, more impact or more volunteer hours? Volunteers and hours are easy to measure, so we tend to fall back on them. But the other things aren’t really difficult to measure. We just haven’t been thinking about measuring impact strategically so we never looked to find objective ways of doing it.
Think about the third mission statement I gave. The measurements for that could be fairly simple. Number of people fed; percentage of people experiencing hunger. Now consider those measurements in terms of reporting. Wouldn’t your board be impressed if you could show that, because of effective volunteer engagement, the number of people experiencing hunger in your community has dropped by X%? Wouldn’t that also catch the attention of your funders?
Boards and funders ask for volunteer and hour numbers because it’s often all that they know to ask for. We need to give them alternatives. Which means that we need to find alternatives. I hope this has helped a bit with that.
Another thing about Boards and funders – they care about impact. It’s why they get involved. Measuring impact, real impact, can lead to significantly more respect and support for your program. And who doesn’t want that?!
