{"id":7790,"date":"2026-03-24T04:39:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-24T11:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/?p=7790"},"modified":"2026-03-11T18:00:05","modified_gmt":"2026-03-12T01:00:05","slug":"measure-roi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/2026\/03\/measure-roi\/","title":{"rendered":"Measure the ROI of your nonprofit’s volunteer engagement by grading each volunteer activity"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>, for the reasons I’ve written about again and again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s a method I think is a much better way to judge the ROI of volunteer activities<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you use this matrix at your organization, let me know in the comments or contact me<\/a>! 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!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also see<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Volunteer Management Audit<\/a> by Susan J. Ellis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Justifying a position as \u201cvolunteer\u201d instead of \u201cpaid staff\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reporting impact should be EASY \u2013 why do so many struggle with it?<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Volunteer Bill of Rights \u2013 a commitment by a host organization to volunteers<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fun way to recognize a year\u2019s worth of participation<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n

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If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site<\/a> and would like to support<\/a> the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help<\/strong><\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20],"tags":[187,1262],"class_list":["post-7790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community-volunteer-engagement","tag-evaluation","tag-measurement"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3fFJB-21E","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7790"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7791,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7790\/revisions\/7791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}