Improve your volunteering service and prove its impact within health & care
Helpforce's Insight & Impact (I&I) service provides an end-to-end process of evaluating volunteering, helping you to gather the evidence you need to show that your volunteers are making a difference within health & care. We support you to design your evaluation, collect data, demonstrate impact against outcome measures and obtain insights to support continuous service improvement.
Take a look at how Health and Care Organisations have used our Insight & Impact tool to help measure their volunteering programme through collecting and evaluating data.
Active Response Volunteers - TTO Deliveries (Barts Health NHS Trust)
Nancy Whiskin • May 2021
To utilise an easy to access and responsive volunteer service to speed up the process of collecting discharge prescriptions from the hospital pharmacy and delivering them to patients waiting to leave hospital. By helping to improve this ‘To Take Out’ (TTO) process volunteers are expected to be contributing to a reduction in hospital discharge delays and improving staff experience.
Activity / Mobility Volunteers (Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust)
Melissa Griffith • May 2021
To encourage patients to leave bed and get dressed in day clothes, encourage and support patients with specially designed mobility-related activities, provide mental stimulation and encouragement at the bedside, and chair-based games to provide further mental stimulation and activity.
How Insight & Impact is already making a difference
We have worked with health organisations over the last 3 years to collect data on high impact volunteering roles, and produce evidenced findings against key NHS measures.
42
Live I&I projects
40
Completed projects
281
Evidenced outcomes
40
Organisations being supported
31
Projects collecting data
Take a look at the evidence we have gathered so far...
Evidenced outcomes
We have worked with multiple NHS organisations on their insight and impact projects. As a result, we have identified key outcomes that demonstrate the impact volunteer services are having.
The I&I platform has helped me think through evaluation of my projects in a logical and robust way. The team are friendly and readily on hand to provide valuable expertise and insight throughout the evaluation journey. Through working with the I&I service, I feel confident that I am measuring what I need to and when I need to in order to prove the positive impact of my project.
Laura Greene, Head of Volunteering
Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
Join 600+ colleagues creating the home of best practice in volunteering across health and care
This is your place to share and discuss volunteering in the NHS and social care - from shaping big ideas to collaborating on coordination and innovation. Join us to shape the future of volunteering.
Helpforce partners with health and care organisations across the UK to accelerate the growth and impact of volunteering. They are an independent not-for-profit innovator, focused on co-creation of volunteering projects with NHS Trusts and systems, and rapidly sharing insights and best practice.
Yes our Insight & Impact (I&I) service is free, you just need to join our Helpforce Network and agree to our terms of service.
Our I&I service supports volunteering initiatives that contribute to improvements in health related outcomes. This includes volunteering initiatives that:
Provide direct benefits to patient/service user health
Help the staff and organisations that work with patients and service users
Assist with continuous improvement of health and care service
If you are looking to undertake an evaluation of an initiative that you believe fits this description, then it is likely that we will be able to help. If you are unsure, please contact us at insight@helpforce.community to discuss.
It varies. It only takes a few minutes to sign up and get started. The time it takes to undertake an evaluation varies depending on the outcomes you are exploring and the level of confidence required around the evidence gathered. Based on experience, some evaluation projects take a few months and others up to a year to collect sufficient data.
Our team will work with you to ensure that your evaluation timeframe and approach are proportionate to your needs and the expectations of key audiences. We will also help you to understand the time you, as the owner of your evaluation project, will need to commit to deliver the best results.
Once the I&I team has agreed to assist you with your evaluation project we will look to work with you through to completion in accordance with our T&Cs.
Before embarking on an evaluation, we will encourage you to consider the ‘readiness’ of your initiative and will work with you to understand what needs to be done to move into the data collection and evaluation phases.
All support is requested via our I&I website. Our team will acknowledge your request and be in touch via email, or telephone/video call as needed. We will only contact you during Monday to Friday core hours and usually within three days of your request.
In our experience of evaluating volunteering initiatives QI teams rarely cover volunteering, which is why we saw a need to create this service.
However, seeking assistance from the Helpforce I&I service does not prevent you from working with QI and Business Intelligence colleagues, or anybody else who you feel can contribute to the success of your evaluation project.
We have no expectation that you inform your manager before using our service but you should follow your own organisation's protocols. If your manager is a key audience for your evaluation project, we will work with you to ensure that the evaluation is tailored to meet their needs.
It is not a requirement to tell your volunteers, but it is very likely that volunteer insights will be sought as part of an evaluation. Early communication with volunteers is usually highly recommended and we encourage the development of a communications strategy to ensure that key audiences engage with the evaluation process.
Our I&I service has been designed to provide users with a simple solution for collecting only the data that can prove the value of your volunteering initiative. The I&I team will be able to access all data you collect to enable us to deliver the results you need.
Helpforce collects, processes and stores all data in compliance with UK GDPR regulations and will not collect or hold sensitive or personal information in our I&I service. Where individual insights and feedback are captured as part of an evaluation it will be processed in accordance with our Privacy Policy.
We understand that you have a workload outside of the I&I evaluation project and will work with you in a flexible way to achieve your evaluation goals. Delays with evaluation are not uncommon and where necessary we will seek to accommodate them within our current workload.
Ready to make a big impact?
Plan, deliver, and measure your volunteering initiative, more easily and effectively with the Helpforce Insight & Impact (I&I) Service
