Evaluating the impacts of your volunteering service

Introduction: evaluating your volunteer service

Why evaluate?

Enlightenment: Robust evaluation can tell us not only whether a service worked, but also
why and how. Evaluation can tell you the merit, worth or value of something (Scriven, 1991)
Improvement; Evaluations can help you improve your service, learning from what is going well
and could be better.

Persuasion: Evaluations can help give you the evidence needed to maintain or grow the service
and investment in it. Your evaluation findings can also inform decision making in your wider
organisation. Working with decision-makers from the outset, you can ensure your evaluation
timeline aligns with their decision-making cycles. This will increase the likelihood of your findings
being applied to make change.

Engagement: Evaluations can also be an opportunity for patient and public representatives’
perspectives to be heard and taken into account to change services.
Who is this guide for? This guide is for managers of volunteering services in hospitals who want to know if their service is
working as intended and to identify ways in which it can be improved.

How to get started?

This evaluation guide can help you get started, whether you are planning a new evaluation or
adapting an existing approach to investigate the impacts of your service.

Our aim is to give you the knowledge and support to:
1) describe how and why your service works
2) plan an evaluation
3) collect and analyse data
4) reflect and report on what your service is achieving.

For the full guide please download the attachment.

You might also be interested in:

Blog: Is your volunteering service making a difference?

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