Some organizations want to evaluate ROI (return on investment) regarding volunteer engagement by comparing the cost to the organization for a particular volunteer activity (staff time to support the activity, materials, etc.) versus how much that volunteer activity brings in in terms of financial donations or revenue generation.

I don’t think that’s a good evaluation method, in part because you do NOT know, for sure, which volunteer activities have resulted in donations. For instance, there may be no way to prove that, as a result of a group of employees from the local Amazon warehouse volunteering at an event, the nonprofit that was supported received a donation from Amazon two months later. There may be no way to prove that, as a result of regularly seeing social media posts featuring photos of volunteers engaged in activities to support a nonprofit that a person decided to donate financially to that nonprofit. 

I also think it’s a lousy method because the value of volunteers is rarely shown via a dollar value. And I refuse to measure volunteer value by assigning a dollar value to each hour a volunteer contributes, for the reasons I’ve written about again and again.

Here’s a method I think is a much better way to judge the ROI of volunteer activities. You can do this evaluation by yourself, as the manager of volunteers, or you can do this as a team exercise with a variety of employees and lead volunteers.

If you use this matrix at your organization, let me know in the comments or contact me! Let me know how it worked out and what you had to change to make it work for your organization. And if you think there’s anything I should add, or clarify, also let me know!

Also see

The Volunteer Management Audit by Susan J. Ellis.

Justifying a position as “volunteer” instead of “paid staff”

Reporting impact should be EASY – why do so many struggle with it?

Volunteer Bill of Rights – a commitment by a host organization to volunteers

Fun way to recognize a year’s worth of participation

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