Unit 5: Measure and evaluate your volunteer program

[Alicia_Schmidt]

The ability to measure the impact of your program is critical to demonstrating effectiveness both internally and externally. We recommend establishing key metrics for employee engagement, setting a protocol to gather insights from nonprofit partners on a regular basis, and building frameworks to capture and communicate the outcomes of your company’s social impact efforts. 

The following sections include tips for monitoring, evaluation, and accountability from Pledge 1% members:

• Volunteer program impact and measurement
• Key metrics from employees
• Key metrics from nonprofit partners
• Paid products to help with time tracking and employee giving
  
  

Volunteer Program Impact and Measurement

When establishing a volunteer program, it’s important to measure your impact on participants and community partners. Tracking progress and gathering feedback will inform decisions around program development, enable you to project growth, set goals, and share insights with key stakeholders.

How do I track impact?

If you’re a lean team (under 20-30 staff members) we suggest leveraging free online tools such as Google Forms to make data collection and analysis accessible online. Here is a sample volunteer time tracking form that includes data on participating employees, nonprofit organizations and volunteer activity details.

 If you’re a larger company, there are a number of different platforms  depending on what you are looking for and how much you want to invest. 

Figure out why you’re tracking → do you want impact metrics to promote externally, do you want stories to get people excited, do you have a Dollars for Doers program and want to know who gets money, etc.?

 Key Metrics From Employees

Here is a list of key metrics to measure and evaluate over time. These metrics can be gathered on an annual basis and/or after a major volunteer event or activity. Keep in mind that you can build up to having a robust range of metrics—as with all elements of your program, we encourage you to start small and evolve as your offerings develop. See the appendix or our How to Get Started Playbook for a sample Employee Volunteer Program Survey.

Examples of Output Metrics	Examples of Outcome Metrics
# of volunteer hours	Reduction of social or environmental ill (e.g. decrease in rate of poverty, hunger, disease, lack of mobility, carbon emissions, etc.) within region or population of focus
# of employees	# of positive milestones reached among population or in area served (e.g. college acceptances received, internships secured, job placements made, etc.)
Participation rate (# of employee volunteers / total # of employees	Long-term corporate benefits gained as a result of participating in a program or receiving intervention (e.g. rise in earnings potential, better health outlook, improved disaster preparedness, etc.)
% of new hires that participate within 90 days of onboarding
# of cities/countries involved (applicable if you have multiple global offices)
# of offices involved (applicable if you have multiple offices)

Key Metrics From Nonprofit Partners

In addition to measuring the impact on employee engagement, it is also important to understand the impact you are having within your community. Here are sample metrics to collect and ask nonprofit partners after a volunteer event. This can be given through a survey or a brief post-volunteer event call with the nonprofit contact.

Examples of Output Metrics	Qualitative Follow-Up Questions for Nonprofit Partners
# of items created/packed/organized	Were there challenges with coordinating the volunteer event?
# of individuals/families/children served	What was the best part of the volunteer event?
	Are there opportunities to offer regularly scheduled activities with our employees, either at the group or individual level?

Paid Products to Support Employee Time Tracking and Volunteering Experience

Once you get to be larger than 50 people, it can get very complicated to manually track volunteer hours donated and/or employee gifts given. As a result, many companies choose to invest in paid products/services to help. To get started on selecting a tool, check out "Selecting a volunteer program management tool."

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Next: Selecting a volunteer program management tool