GreaterGood South Africa

The real value of volunteering
Sunday, January 31st 2010

With volunteering under fire for being more about the volunteer experience than social impact, GreaterGood SA’s Sophie Hobbs takes a closer look at the real value of volunteering and how to measure it.

Volunteering has been at the centre of a hot debate recently, for not adding real value to the social development organisations that it is meant to support. UK charity, Workplace Giving, argues that volunteering is in danger of becoming more about the volunteer experience than about passing on true benefit to the cause.

Team-building

Elena Joseph, head of new projects and charity liaison at Workplace Giving argues: “Companies risk using volunteering as a team-building exercise rather than a way to benefit the charity. For example, painting a community hall is probably better and more quickly done by professionals – wouldn’t it be more sensible to give the charities the money to pay for it?”

This is a view often felt, but not often expressed, by non profits and causes who sometimes struggle to find jobs for well-meaning volunteers to do.

Experience

Since it was started in 2004, GreaterGood has facilitated almost 140,000 individual and corporate volunteer hours at hundreds of causes across South Africa. And we have also grappled with the notion of the ‘social return’ of volunteering. Do the 1,900 causes registered on our giving network really need another wall painted? And, if not, what is it they do need?

We know that volunteering makes a difference – surveys, volunteer reportbacks and the evidence of our own experience shows us this. But how do we measure the value of volunteer time? How can we be sure that our contribution as volunteers is the most useful and will have the greatest impact?

We’ve discovered that unless volunteers are engaged in a meaningful, long-term and holistic way, volunteerism’s potential to affect social change is limited.

Corporate volunteers

“Your CSI strategy should be integrated with your business objectives to be effective and so should your employee volunteering programme,” says GreaterCapital’s business development director, Carol Tappenden. “Companies leverage the resources they have in capital to contribute to social upliftment but they can also leverage their additional resources in terms of staff time and energy.”

The best and most effective employee volunteer initiatives are those that look firstly at where staff are already engaged in the community and then at a whole range of ways to integrate this involvement and enthusiasm with CSI strategy and spend. The value of CSI funding is compounded by employee engagement in a project. And this approach has the added benefit of helping employees to understand, in a real and tangible way, how the company supports the community in which it works.

Time is money

A recent survey found that individuals who volunteered were more likely to leave money to charity in their will than people who did not volunteer – 35% compared to 20% (Standard Life, 2010) – pointing to a link between volunteering and other kinds of giving. If there was ever any doubt about the link between volunteers and future donations, you need only look at the way employed volunteers, in particular, will pick up and run with a cause that they feel connected to – often leveraging donations from the CSI programme as well as contributing from their own pocket through payroll giving.

And 88% of Do It Day volunteers said they would support the same cause again in our 2009 volunteer survey.

Valuing volunteering

But volunteering is not about money. It is about the provision of skills and time to help build our nation. Increasingly, with the focus on fundraising and project materials, the true spirit of volunteerism is at risk of getting lost.

If we could find a mechanism to evaluate the impact of volunteering on beneficiary organisations, communities and the volunteers themselves, we could help society to understand the real value of voluntary contributions.

As Barack Obama so eloquently put it in his presidential acceptance speech: “I will never forget that the only reason I\'m standing here today is because somebody, somewhere stood up for me when it was risky. Stood up when it was hard. Stood up when it wasn\'t popular. And because that somebody stood up, a few more stood up. And then a few thousand stood up. And then a few million stood up. And standing up, with courage and clear purpose, they somehow managed to change the world.”

Watch this space!

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