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25 years evaluating the impact of volunteer involvement
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For over 25 years, the Institute for Volunteering Research has developed research to provide evidence on the difference volunteering makes for those involved with volunteers and for the volunteers themselves. Measuring the difference has been integral to our work. In 2005 we were early sharers of our impact assessment knowledge and experience through offering our Volunteer Impact Assessment Toolkit. You can access a free copy of its much-used third edition from 2015 here.
We are now working on a revised fourth edition to be made available as an open access resource, directly contributing knowledge to the International Year of Volunteers in 2026..
In collaboration with partners in volunteer involving organisations as well as in public and private sector organisations, we never stopped learning from our activities and continued to develop our approaches. Our collaborations included working on ways to evaluate impact in the NHS in 2008, read a report here, and continue today, as in the project ‘Volunteering for Health in Norfolk and Waveney’. Here our director describes IVR’s involvement as an evaluation partner, Volunteering Discovery | Podcast on Spotify. In this podcast, he explains that the most important questions of an evaluation are ‘what are you evaluating’ and ‘why are you evaluating it’? How we can then successfully evaluate volunteering programmes, policies and practices will flow from the answers to those fundamental questions. Furthermore, in evaluations involving volunteers, he points out that respecting their involvement and clearly acknowledging their agency is fundamental. Involvement as a volunteer is a choice people make and so involvement in evaluations should neither be imposed nor made a condition of the evaluation. This is a fundamental principle to ethical involvement. Volunteers get involved to make a difference, not to answer evaluation questions.
For the next International Year of Volunteers, the United Nations’ programme UN Volunteers calls for better measurement of the impact of volunteers around the globe and is expected to suggest multiple ways forward. We will collaborate with our global partners, including in a Call To Action, to critically review the proposed approaches, applying our experience to support and strengthen evaluation practice in volunteering.
IVR was set up in 1997 to undertake high quality research on volunteering. It was established as a partnership between Volunteering England and the University of East London. In 2013 with the merger of Volunteering England and the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) it moved to NCVO and subsequently in 2019 to the University of East Anglia, becoming a Research Centre.
Our current programme of work continues IVR’s mission to support and undertake high quality volunteering research to bring about a world where the power and energy of volunteering is recognised and where volunteering research can thrive. Volunteering and volunteering research can thus be widely recognised as making a distinctive difference to individuals and communities so that volunteers themselves can feel safe and confident about their decision to volunteer and so that communities can grow stronger.
Get in touch with us by emailing info.ivr@uea.ac.uk
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Video
IVR has created a series of short animations on volunteering for beginners
Volunteering for Beginners in seven and a half minutes
And if you haven’t got seven and a half minutes, here are short videos on
Where and how can I volunteer?
What difference does volunteering make?
What are the benefits for the volunteer?
