While most of my posts are specific to volunteer management, this one reaches out more to fundraisers and IT folks.
In business I can very easily justify spending $100,000 if it guaranteed (i.e. no risk) that it would reduce costs by $100,000 or boost sales enough that the profit from each sale would add up to be $100,000 a year for the next three years. (I get there is rarely a situation where there is no risk, but let’s work under that assumption to keep things simple for now.) By spending the $100,000 I would save/gain $300,000 over the three years and in the end, be $200,000 ahead! . It would still be an easy justification if the net effect on the bottom line was +$50,000 a year. By spending the $100,000 I would save/gain $150,000 over the three years and, in the end, be $50,000 ahead! One could even argue that if there truly was no risk, it would be justifiable to spend $100,000 once to create an extra $33,667 on the bottom line for three years. The business would then end up $1,000 ahead three years down the road. It’s only $1,000 but that’s still $1,000 (remember that in this scenario there was no risk).
As a business owner, it would be easy to justify any of the above because I would be trading money in my pocket for more money in my pocket. That sounds simple and in business it is. I get the feeling though these days that the charitable sector sees this just like it would be seen in business. Although I am a big advocate of charities and nonprofits adopting appropriate strategies from the for-profit sector (and visa versa), this is one that I don’t see as appropriate. While in the business case, I would be trading money in my pocket for more money in my pocket, in a charity’s case, it would be trading money in the donor’s pocket for both money in the charity’s pocket (the pocket that does the good stuff the donor wants to support) and also the pocket of the technology providers.
In some of the chatter I read and hear about donor databases connecting seemlessly to membership databases or volunteer databases and donor databases talking to each other etc. etc., I have seen too many examples lately where the mentality seems to be, “If we spent $X and we think it will generate donations anything greater than $X, it is worth pursuing”. I have various issues with this but there is only one I want to focus on today.
Picture for a moment that you have recently donated $1,000 to the ABC charity to help them _______ (insert your passionate thing here). If later you found out that it was a commissioned fundraiser who earned $990 parting you and your $1,000, you who likely not be very happy that only $10 went to (insert your passionate thing here). With just a slight change in the scenario, would you feel any better if there was no commissioned fundraiser but after the new data analysis technology that sought you out as a potential donor was paid for, the net result of your donation was that $990 went to the technology provider and staff time on the project and $10 went to (insert your passionate thing here)?
But it is still a positive return on investment for the charity. The data that was analyzed/shared/extrapolate etc. suggested that you would give and you did. In fact, it is the same ROI of the one scenario above in the for-profit business examples. The 1% ROI was fine in the for-profit model but apparently not here. Of course those are exaggerated numbers and everyone reading this likely already understands the importance of infrastructure costs and how these need the support of donors. I get it too and that is not what I am at issue with here.
The big questions to leave you with are ….
• When you are looking at a new expenditure for analyzing or sharing or extrapolating data for the sole purpose of raising more donations, what ROI is acceptable to your organization?
• Perhaps more importantly, what would be acceptable to the donors making the new donations?
• If the donors knew the portion of their donation that went into the analyzing / sharing / extrapolation of data that was spent getting them to consider donating, would they still have given?
• Where do new infrastructure costs related solely to getting more donations cross the line?
Showing posts with label ROI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ROI. Show all posts
Thursday, November 01, 2012
Friday, October 19, 2012
Data Will Always Give You the Wrong Answer When You Ask the Wrong Question
If a nonprofit or charity truly values the time of their volunteer,
why is there pressure on managers of volunteers to increase the number
of hours volunteered continually, without a correlated look at what
outputs are generated with those hours. "How many hours did we get from
volunteers?" is the wrong question, but sadly, it's the one on which the
sector is currently focused. The right question is "What is the
relationship between the number of hours of volunteer time that we
consumed related to the value of what we accomplished?".
Consider the information below about a hypothetical nonprofit.
In most of the organizations with which I have worked, the reporting that is requested from volunteer managers focuses on reports such as those above and in almost all of them, the manager would be considered to be failing in her job: the numbers of volunteer hours went down every year. In many cases, those hours are looked at as time that would have had to have been paid for or as associated with services that would not have been delivered had the time not been volunteered. Both can be false assumptions.
What if we add more data to the picture. (Assume for now that all this organization does is plant trees.)
It turns out this volunteer manager has been doing a great job and should be congratulated for accomplishing more with less. How did she do it? Maybe she had been over-scheduling in the past and got better at it with more experience. Maybe she provided her volunteers with training and they were then able to plant trees with greater ease and therefore planted more trees per hour. Maybe she bought better shovels.
The point is that from a resource management perspective, year 4 is far better than year 1. When the right question is not asked, the answer leads us astray.
Some of you might have raised your eyebrows on "bought better shovels". If you did so because you recognized that the cost of those shovels needs to be included somehow in this analysis, pat yourself on the back: you are correct. (If however, you did so because you thought it was wrong to spend money on better shovels when you had the option of letting volunteers work inefficiently since they are "free", get someone to kick you in the back-side.)
I believe that if we truly value the time of our volunteers, we should operate under the premise that we are spending their time, just like we spend cash. And, similarly to how we spend cash, we should spend as little of it as needed in order to accomplish our mission.
This relates to the principle of Scarce Resources. The important element of the principle of Scarce Resources is not that something can't be found, but rather, that a consumable resource can only be used once. A single dollar cannot be used to make two separate purchases and person cannot volunteer the same hour in two different places. That we must choose how to spend that dollar and we must choose how to spend that hour demonstrate the similarity between the two. As they are similar in nature, we should treat them the same: Consume as little as possible to achieve your mission.
I recognize that sometimes money is harder to come by than volunteer hours, so the option to purchase the "better shovels" might not always exist, but that does not break down the rationale of looking at volunteer time as something we spend and should try to minimize. Scheduling of volunteers in a manner that better aligns with needs and providing volunteers with better training can reduce the number of hours consumed with little or no increase in cost.
Simple financial reporting is a lousy management accounting tool - even more so in nonprofits
The adoption of the approach above can not only lead to more efficient consumption of volunteer resources, it opens the door to better management across an organization as a whole. Financial reporting by nonprofits only tells a portion of the story. By their nature, nonprofits more or less break even each year. The dollars spent are equal to the dollars they take in.
The following table represents the essence of financial reporting in the nonprofit sector (albeit simplified). It shows the two years of an organization as working at similar levels financially in that they both have neither a profit nor a loss, but are seemingly underperforming on donations/revenue in year two.
Let's look at how these two years compare if we add something new to the reporting.
All other things being equal, Year 2 has clearly outperformed Year 1, since the same job got done while consuming fewer resources. If these were two different organizations rather two years of the same organization, to which one would you rather make a donation?
The financial records alone would not have demonstrated the differences in performance between these two years; in both years, the organization ran a balanced budget.
The path to the right answer begins with the right question
Because of the arithmetic simplicity of both of the examples above, we can intuitively see which year had the better performance. The application of this in real world, however, needs some means of comparing the data along some similar element. The return on investment formula,
For organizations whose outputs are similar to something in the for-profit sector, a monetary value for these outputs is easy to derive: use the same value the commercial sector uses. If your nonprofit does tax returns for people who need help with them but can't afford it, use the price you would have to pay if you went to a commercial service for one.
In other situations, putting a dollar value on something such as a friendly visit in a hospital is more difficult, although it is possible (although outside the scope of this article). Where it is deemed that actual dollar values simply cannot be placed on the outputs of your organization, the ROI model can still be used but the results have to be looked at slightly differently because dollars are used to value inputs and something else is used for outputs whereas the equation is designed to compare apples to apples.
Rather than place a dollar figure on each output, place a Mission Points value where the various Mission Points assigned to the various outputs indicate the relative degrees to which each one contributes to your mission.
Consider the information below about a hypothetical nonprofit.
|
Year
|
1
|
2
|
3
|
4
|
|
Number of Volunteer Hours
|
100,000
|
90,000
|
80,000
|
70,000
|
In most of the organizations with which I have worked, the reporting that is requested from volunteer managers focuses on reports such as those above and in almost all of them, the manager would be considered to be failing in her job: the numbers of volunteer hours went down every year. In many cases, those hours are looked at as time that would have had to have been paid for or as associated with services that would not have been delivered had the time not been volunteered. Both can be false assumptions.
What if we add more data to the picture. (Assume for now that all this organization does is plant trees.)
|
Year
|
1
|
2
|
3
|
4
|
|
Number of Volunteer Hours
|
100,000
|
90,000
|
80,000
|
70,000
|
|
Trees Planted
|
500,000
|
500,000
|
500,000
|
500,000
|
It turns out this volunteer manager has been doing a great job and should be congratulated for accomplishing more with less. How did she do it? Maybe she had been over-scheduling in the past and got better at it with more experience. Maybe she provided her volunteers with training and they were then able to plant trees with greater ease and therefore planted more trees per hour. Maybe she bought better shovels.
The point is that from a resource management perspective, year 4 is far better than year 1. When the right question is not asked, the answer leads us astray.
Some of you might have raised your eyebrows on "bought better shovels". If you did so because you recognized that the cost of those shovels needs to be included somehow in this analysis, pat yourself on the back: you are correct. (If however, you did so because you thought it was wrong to spend money on better shovels when you had the option of letting volunteers work inefficiently since they are "free", get someone to kick you in the back-side.)
I believe that if we truly value the time of our volunteers, we should operate under the premise that we are spending their time, just like we spend cash. And, similarly to how we spend cash, we should spend as little of it as needed in order to accomplish our mission.
This relates to the principle of Scarce Resources. The important element of the principle of Scarce Resources is not that something can't be found, but rather, that a consumable resource can only be used once. A single dollar cannot be used to make two separate purchases and person cannot volunteer the same hour in two different places. That we must choose how to spend that dollar and we must choose how to spend that hour demonstrate the similarity between the two. As they are similar in nature, we should treat them the same: Consume as little as possible to achieve your mission.
I recognize that sometimes money is harder to come by than volunteer hours, so the option to purchase the "better shovels" might not always exist, but that does not break down the rationale of looking at volunteer time as something we spend and should try to minimize. Scheduling of volunteers in a manner that better aligns with needs and providing volunteers with better training can reduce the number of hours consumed with little or no increase in cost.
Simple financial reporting is a lousy management accounting tool - even more so in nonprofits
The adoption of the approach above can not only lead to more efficient consumption of volunteer resources, it opens the door to better management across an organization as a whole. Financial reporting by nonprofits only tells a portion of the story. By their nature, nonprofits more or less break even each year. The dollars spent are equal to the dollars they take in.
The following table represents the essence of financial reporting in the nonprofit sector (albeit simplified). It shows the two years of an organization as working at similar levels financially in that they both have neither a profit nor a loss, but are seemingly underperforming on donations/revenue in year two.
|
Year
|
1
|
2
|
|
Donations and Fees for Service
|
~$1,000,000
|
~$800,000
|
|
Expenses
|
~$1,000,000
|
~$800,000
|
|
Difference
|
$0
|
$0
|
Let's look at how these two years compare if we add something new to the reporting.
|
Year
|
1
|
2
|
|
Donations and Fees for Service
|
~$1,000,000
|
~$800,000
|
|
Expenses
|
~$1,000,000
|
~$800,000
|
|
Difference
|
$0
|
$0
|
|
Trees Planted
|
20,000
|
20,000
|
All other things being equal, Year 2 has clearly outperformed Year 1, since the same job got done while consuming fewer resources. If these were two different organizations rather two years of the same organization, to which one would you rather make a donation?
The financial records alone would not have demonstrated the differences in performance between these two years; in both years, the organization ran a balanced budget.
The path to the right answer begins with the right question
Because of the arithmetic simplicity of both of the examples above, we can intuitively see which year had the better performance. The application of this in real world, however, needs some means of comparing the data along some similar element. The return on investment formula,
ROI = (Inputs-Outputs) / Outputs,
provides us with that common element. Key to this methodology are three things.- The value of volunteer time is treated as an input, along with cash expenses
- The outputs must be tracked and we must place a value on those outputs
- The outputs must be in line with the outcomes associated with the organization's mission
For organizations whose outputs are similar to something in the for-profit sector, a monetary value for these outputs is easy to derive: use the same value the commercial sector uses. If your nonprofit does tax returns for people who need help with them but can't afford it, use the price you would have to pay if you went to a commercial service for one.
In other situations, putting a dollar value on something such as a friendly visit in a hospital is more difficult, although it is possible (although outside the scope of this article). Where it is deemed that actual dollar values simply cannot be placed on the outputs of your organization, the ROI model can still be used but the results have to be looked at slightly differently because dollars are used to value inputs and something else is used for outputs whereas the equation is designed to compare apples to apples.
Rather than place a dollar figure on each output, place a Mission Points value where the various Mission Points assigned to the various outputs indicate the relative degrees to which each one contributes to your mission.
Friday, June 29, 2012
Resources to calculate the ROI of volunteer engagement
For the past couple of years I have been working on a new model to measure the return on investment of engaging volunteers in a n organization. Because the emphasis of my model is to treat the expenditure of volunteer hours the same as the expenditure of cash I refer to it as the Scarce Resources Model. In economic terms, scarce does not mean hard to find but rather that there is a finite pool. Because there is a finite pool choices have to be made how each dollar is spent and choices have to be mad how each volunteer hour is "spent". Better choices lead to a higher ROI which typically indicates a better allocation of resources toward an organizations mission.
The programming team at Volunteer2 has put together a few free online calculators to help organizations measure their ROI. You can find them at www.volunteer2.com/ROI.
The model is young and certainly not perfect, but according to one participant of my conference workshops on the subject, "leaps and bounds better than what we have today". Not everyone is on board but the vast majority of conference participants agree.
I'll be writing more on the topic over the next year and I welcome your feedback.
Up-coming venues that include this presentation include:
July 17 Portland OR USA - Volunteer Portland (Session Sold Out)
August 9 - Chicago, IL USA - ICOVA Conference
September 11 - Ottawa ON Canada - Volunteer Ottawa
September 18 - Columbus OH USA - 2012 Annual Ohio Conference on Service and Volunteerism
September 27 - Vancouver, BC Canada - Volunteer BC Conference
October 24 - Truro NS Canada - Recreation Nova Scotia Conference
October 26 - Topeka KS USA - 2012 Kansas Conference on Service & Volunteerism
Email me at tony@volunteer2.com with your location if you would like me to let you know when I'll be presenting at a venue near you, or if you would like me to try schedule a workshop in your community. (The workshop is free and if I'm traveling close enough, there's no travel costs to pay.)
The programming team at Volunteer2 has put together a few free online calculators to help organizations measure their ROI. You can find them at www.volunteer2.com/ROI.
The model is young and certainly not perfect, but according to one participant of my conference workshops on the subject, "leaps and bounds better than what we have today". Not everyone is on board but the vast majority of conference participants agree.
I'll be writing more on the topic over the next year and I welcome your feedback.
Up-coming venues that include this presentation include:
July 17 Portland OR USA - Volunteer Portland (Session Sold Out)
August 9 - Chicago, IL USA - ICOVA Conference
September 11 - Ottawa ON Canada - Volunteer Ottawa
September 18 - Columbus OH USA - 2012 Annual Ohio Conference on Service and Volunteerism
September 27 - Vancouver, BC Canada - Volunteer BC Conference
October 24 - Truro NS Canada - Recreation Nova Scotia Conference
October 26 - Topeka KS USA - 2012 Kansas Conference on Service & Volunteerism
Email me at tony@volunteer2.com with your location if you would like me to let you know when I'll be presenting at a venue near you, or if you would like me to try schedule a workshop in your community. (The workshop is free and if I'm traveling close enough, there's no travel costs to pay.)
Sunday, May 06, 2012
You always get the wrong answer when you ask the wrong question
I recently conducted a small survey of people that work with volunteers that asked which of two organizations they would choose to give their time, given the following highly hypothetical set of circumstances.
If you fell into any of the first three bullet points above, I invite you to consider a brand new perspective in measuring the ROI of volunteer engagement.
In its most basic level, consider the wage replacement method of measuring ROI that compares the total dollars spent to the number of volunteer hours multiplied by some benchmark hourly value of volunteer time. In theory (because I know nobody would do this), if someone had 20 volunteers come in every Saturday and sit there and do nothing for three hours, their total hours for the year would go up and therefore their ROI would go up. While nobody would do this (at least not intentionally), it illustrates the flaw in this methodology. When the wage replacement model was first introduced, it filled a void where no measurement was being done and as such served its purpose. Like all professions, the volunteer sector looks for tweaks and improvements to what has been done on the past and the Scarce Resource Model as the next step in management reporting.
The second slide of my presentation reads “All the wrong people are here”. I say that because I recognize that Mangers of Volunteers are asked for wage replacement modeled reports by their boards, bosses and fund granting agencies. While teaching the Scarce Resources Model to managers of volunteers is clearly useful, those asking for reports need to reconsider what information is truly useful to them: because, as my first slide empathizes, “You always get the wrong answer when you ask the wrong question”.
Up-coming venues that include this presentation include:
May 25 - Victoria, BC Canada - Volunteer Victoria
May 31 - London, England - Volunteer Fair
June 17 - Chicago, IL USA - Summit on Advanced Volunteer Engagement
June 18 - Chicago, IL USA - National Conference on Volunteering and Service
June 21 - Chicago, IL USA - Salvation Army, Central Territory Conference
July 17 Portland OR USA - Volunteer Portland
August 9 - Chicago, IL USA - ICOVA Conference
September 11 - Ottawa ON Canada - Volunteer Ottawa
September 18 - Columbus OH USA - 2012 Annual Ohio Conference on Service and Volunteerism
September 27 - Vancouver, BC Canada - Volunteer BC Conference
October 24 - Truro NS Canada - Recreation Nova Scotia Conference
October 26 - Topeka KS USA - 2012 Kansas Conference on Service & Volunteerism
Email me at tony@volunteer2.com with your location if you would like me to let you know when I'll be presenting at a venue near you.
- Both organizations (let’s call them A and B) planted 500,000 trees in a year.
- Planting trees was all that each of them did.
- They both spent the same amount of money in a year.
- In fact the only difference between the two was that Organization A had 900 volunteers and Organization B had 1,000 volunteers.
- 35% chose A because they felt that A “needs more volunteers”.
- 15% chose B because “it must be the better organization because it had more volunteers”.
- 10% said they could not see any difference.
- 40% chose A because it was more efficient in its deployment of volunteers.
If you fell into any of the first three bullet points above, I invite you to consider a brand new perspective in measuring the ROI of volunteer engagement.
In its most basic level, consider the wage replacement method of measuring ROI that compares the total dollars spent to the number of volunteer hours multiplied by some benchmark hourly value of volunteer time. In theory (because I know nobody would do this), if someone had 20 volunteers come in every Saturday and sit there and do nothing for three hours, their total hours for the year would go up and therefore their ROI would go up. While nobody would do this (at least not intentionally), it illustrates the flaw in this methodology. When the wage replacement model was first introduced, it filled a void where no measurement was being done and as such served its purpose. Like all professions, the volunteer sector looks for tweaks and improvements to what has been done on the past and the Scarce Resource Model as the next step in management reporting.
The second slide of my presentation reads “All the wrong people are here”. I say that because I recognize that Mangers of Volunteers are asked for wage replacement modeled reports by their boards, bosses and fund granting agencies. While teaching the Scarce Resources Model to managers of volunteers is clearly useful, those asking for reports need to reconsider what information is truly useful to them: because, as my first slide empathizes, “You always get the wrong answer when you ask the wrong question”.
Up-coming venues that include this presentation include:
May 25 - Victoria, BC Canada - Volunteer Victoria
May 31 - London, England - Volunteer Fair
June 17 - Chicago, IL USA - Summit on Advanced Volunteer Engagement
June 18 - Chicago, IL USA - National Conference on Volunteering and Service
June 21 - Chicago, IL USA - Salvation Army, Central Territory Conference
July 17 Portland OR USA - Volunteer Portland
August 9 - Chicago, IL USA - ICOVA Conference
September 11 - Ottawa ON Canada - Volunteer Ottawa
September 18 - Columbus OH USA - 2012 Annual Ohio Conference on Service and Volunteerism
September 27 - Vancouver, BC Canada - Volunteer BC Conference
October 24 - Truro NS Canada - Recreation Nova Scotia Conference
October 26 - Topeka KS USA - 2012 Kansas Conference on Service & Volunteerism
Email me at tony@volunteer2.com with your location if you would like me to let you know when I'll be presenting at a venue near you.
Wednesday, November 02, 2011
How are frogs like processes?
Both can make amazing leaps. You can too if you don’t needlessly weigh yourself down.
Let me begin by quoting a portion of a blog by Aleem Walji, Head of Global Development Initiatives, Google.org:
“Mobile is growing faster in Africa than in any other part of the world. While levels of internet penetration are well below 5% for the continent, nearly 40% have access to mobile phones and Nairobi sends more text messages in a single day than New York (a statistic frequently quoted in the region).”
You see, because land-line telephones have not typically reached rural Africa, there is no legacy system in place to act as a boat anchor – nothing to hold them back from adopting something new and better.
I have been aware of this phenomenon for some time, but it resurfaced in a very real way for me while presenting at the Asia Pacific Regional IAVE conference this past weekend. My presentation was on the Mission Points model of measuring the Return On Investment of volunteer engagement. The Mission Points model looks to supplant the outdated Wage Replacement model of measuring ROI, with something more aligned to the needs of today’s volunteer sector.
What fascinates me is that, although there were some concepts in the Mission Points model that the Asian participants will want time to digest, there was no sense of struggle with – or resistance to – the ideas presented. I can’t help but to think that the reason for this is similar to cell phones taking off in Africa. The Asian participants have not adopted the whole Wage Replacement model in the same way that the volunteer sector has in parts of the western world. Without an anchor to hold them back, they were free to look at something new and judge it solely upon its own merits; and they did not have to be concerned about what might be left behind in order to get it. (More information on the Mission Points ROI model can be found here at: www.volunteer2.com/ROI.)
So the point is, be very cautious of the “that’s-not-how-we’ve-always-done-it” attitude. While it is certainly true that not everything new is necessarily good, we should always be on the lookout for old processes that prevent us from looking forward.
Cloud computing is certainly one of those things that many people are wary of because it is a software model that they are simply not used to… yet. The writing is on the wall, and while I would never make a silly claim such as “it will be with us forever” (because nothing is these days), it is clearly the direction we are headed in for the next while.
At Volunteer2 we asked ourselves questions around this ten years ago, when we chose not to develop a desktop version alongside our cloud based software. In retrospect, I am thankful to my team for convincing me that generating a desktop model would have been our own boat anchor – slowing down the development of what we know today as Volunteer Impact.
Let me begin by quoting a portion of a blog by Aleem Walji, Head of Global Development Initiatives, Google.org:
“Mobile is growing faster in Africa than in any other part of the world. While levels of internet penetration are well below 5% for the continent, nearly 40% have access to mobile phones and Nairobi sends more text messages in a single day than New York (a statistic frequently quoted in the region).”
You see, because land-line telephones have not typically reached rural Africa, there is no legacy system in place to act as a boat anchor – nothing to hold them back from adopting something new and better.
I have been aware of this phenomenon for some time, but it resurfaced in a very real way for me while presenting at the Asia Pacific Regional IAVE conference this past weekend. My presentation was on the Mission Points model of measuring the Return On Investment of volunteer engagement. The Mission Points model looks to supplant the outdated Wage Replacement model of measuring ROI, with something more aligned to the needs of today’s volunteer sector.
What fascinates me is that, although there were some concepts in the Mission Points model that the Asian participants will want time to digest, there was no sense of struggle with – or resistance to – the ideas presented. I can’t help but to think that the reason for this is similar to cell phones taking off in Africa. The Asian participants have not adopted the whole Wage Replacement model in the same way that the volunteer sector has in parts of the western world. Without an anchor to hold them back, they were free to look at something new and judge it solely upon its own merits; and they did not have to be concerned about what might be left behind in order to get it. (More information on the Mission Points ROI model can be found here at: www.volunteer2.com/ROI.)
So the point is, be very cautious of the “that’s-not-how-we’ve-always-done-it” attitude. While it is certainly true that not everything new is necessarily good, we should always be on the lookout for old processes that prevent us from looking forward.
Cloud computing is certainly one of those things that many people are wary of because it is a software model that they are simply not used to… yet. The writing is on the wall, and while I would never make a silly claim such as “it will be with us forever” (because nothing is these days), it is clearly the direction we are headed in for the next while.
At Volunteer2 we asked ourselves questions around this ten years ago, when we chose not to develop a desktop version alongside our cloud based software. In retrospect, I am thankful to my team for convincing me that generating a desktop model would have been our own boat anchor – slowing down the development of what we know today as Volunteer Impact.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Calculating the ROI of volunteer engagement for internal performance monitoring
While working with leaders of volunteers at conferences, or one on one, I have repeatedly heard that the contribution of volunteer time is highly valued; but that this value has been difficult to measure.
There are a variety of ways to measure the effect of volunteer engagement, and each approach has its own specific purpose. Some methods look at the benefits that volunteering brings to the volunteers themselves. Some look at the monumental vision of how volunteerism shapes a community – or bigger yet, a society. Many approaches look only at wage replacement value in relationship to the number of volunteer hours contributed.
This last method, although perhaps helpful in the past, has become less useful as the sector has come to recognize volunteerism as something more than just hours. The Mission Points ROI model treats the number of volunteer hours consumed by an organization, as an expense. Viewed as expenditure, we would value volunteer time in the same way that we value money: we would spend only to the degree necessary, to best reach the mission of our organization. Consuming more volunteer hours might mean more gets accomplished – or it may mean volunteer time is being wasted.
The Mission Points ROI model allows us to see volunteer contributions as an expense, and in turn encourages us to manage our incredibly valuable volunteer resources more effectively.
I would like to thank the many conference participants that have helped shape the vision of the Mission Points model through offering their input during workshops and presentations. I would also like to thank some very knowledgeable individuals who have, in one way or another, supported my pursuit of developing this model, and/or contributed directly to it. This includes Susan Ellis, Steve McCurley, Andy Fryar, Martin Cowling, Rick Lynch and Rob Jackson.
I would like to thank the many conference participants that have helped shape the vision of the Mission Points model through offering their input during workshops and presentations. I would also like to thank some very knowledgeable individuals who have, in one way or another, supported my pursuit of developing this model, and/or contributed directly to it. This includes Susan Ellis, Steve McCurley, Andy Fryar, Martin Cowling, Rick Lynch and Rob Jackson.
Volunteer2 is happy to announce the launch of another free online
resource for the volunteer sector: the Mission Points ROI calculator,
designed to help you measure the Return On Investment associated with
engaging volunteers at your organization. I invite you to explore this concept further, by downloading the Mission Points ROI manual, and giving the concept a try at www.Volunteer2.com/ROI. If this sounds interesting to you, please feel free to share this information with your peers. As we develop the Mission Points ROI model further, we welcome as many suggestions as possible in order to improve and refine it as a vital Volunteer Management resource.
Friday, September 23, 2011
Leaders in the volunteer sector reinforce bad practices
Jayne Craven just posted UN Volunteers, IFRC, ILO & others make HUGE misstep. and the news she brings us is not good.
Quoting Jayne,"The measurement so many of us have been campaigning to end - or at least not make the primary measurement of the value of volunteering - is being officially embraced by UNV and IFRC."
I agree with Jayne that there are more useful and quite frankly more accurate ways of measuring the value of volunteer engagement.
To Jayne's list of ways we can talk about the value of volunteers at the community level, I would like to add one at the organizational level.
- To what degree does the engagement of volunteers lead to the accomplishment of the organization's mission?
In the next couple of weeks I'll be introducing an ROI (Return on Investment) calculator for volunteer effort. It does not look at the big community/global picture such as the enlightened ways Jayne describes volunteering can be valued. This calculator is designed as a management tool to help nonprofits allocate resources in a manner that maximizes the accomplishment of its mission. Common to Jayne's view of valuing volunteer effort, the focus is not on the accumulation of hours as goal. It is being sponsored by www.Volunteer2.com so it will be available to use at no cost.
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