Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Every year, you might find it easy to share the number of volunteers your organization engages, or how many hours these volunteers gave. However, these numbers don’t tell the full story of the impact your volunteers are making. You may not even realize it, but you might have a wealth of data already at your fingertips to help you communicate the real impact of volunteers! Here are a few steps to get you there:

Step 1: Get to Know Your Volunteers
Whether you have volunteers providing direct service to clients, or people sharing time helping with data entry and donor communications, your volunteers are making a difference across the organization. This also includes your Board of Directors, a vital volunteer role that every non-profit and charity must rely upon. To share everyone’s impact, get to know all of your volunteers and encourage your manager, senior leadership and other staff to build these relationships as well.


Step 2: Collect the Data You Have
Alongside volunteer hours and shifts, look for program-specific data. Think of things like how many meals volunteers delivered in a specific time period, the number of clients assisted, or the amount of funds raised. Your organization may be tracking this information in different places, so it’s good to collect all the important data that shows what your volunteers actually did while volunteering.


Step 3: Evaluate to Discover the Data You Don’t Have
You may not have all the data you need, so a program evaluation could be helpful. For instance, you could ask program participants or clients a question about their health, wellbeing, knowledge or some area before they get support from volunteers, then ask the same question again afterward. If the response changed, you now have an “impact measurement” to show what the volunteers did.


Here's an example for a Friendly Visiting program, where volunteers meet with clients in their homes once per week to provide social interaction:

- When a client joins the program, they fill out a short survey. One of the questions asks how much they agree or disagree to the statement “I feel socially isolated” on a scale.

- Let’s say the client answered “strongly agree”, meaning they felt very socially isolated.

- After a month or a few months of volunteer visits, the client is asked the same questions.

This time, the client said “disagree”, meaning they no longer feel the same degree of social isolation. The organization can now measurably share that the volunteer made an impact!


Step 4: Change the Reporting Narrative
As you collect more data, you’ll find ways to go beyond basic volunteer numbers to show staff, leadership and your community the impact volunteers are making. Share a story or impact measurement in team meetings and newsletters, highlight volunteer impact across your communication channels, and consider going beyond a single page in Annual Report to a greater celebration of volunteer impact.

Check out some examples of Volunteer Impact Reports from the Ottawa Food Bank and Ottawa Community Housing.