Volunteering & Skills

Why Measure Volunteering and Skills?

The development of people's skills and volunteering through events is not just an important social impact in its own right, but is also an important operational objective if future events are to be sustainable.

Events can offer diverse opportunities for people to gain valuable experiences and skills that they may not be able to develop within their own working environments. Events may entail training opportunities to up-skill their workforce, providing the volunteer workforce with transferrable skills and the host region with better quality support for future events. The benefit for the event organiser is the provision of cost-effective labour, which is sometimes highly skilled in nature and often makes the difference in events becoming financially viable.

If events intend to use volunteering to develop 'social capital' in this way, it is essential that they establish appropriate objectives from the outset, and that recruitment policies are set which seek to support these objectives.

Choosing a level of Impact

Volunteering and skills impacts have been broken down into three categories based upon the ease with which they can be measured. Further details on this categorisation can be found here.

• Basic Volunteering & Skills Impacts

  

  Considers some basic measures around event volunteering including total hours, value and duration of volunteer engagement

  

• Intermediate Volunteering & Skills Impacts

  

  Considers measuring people's satisfaction with the volunteer experience and intent to re-volunteer

  

• Advanced Volunteering & Skills Impacts

  

  Considers the scope and process by which longer-term impacts might be felt by volunteers