Helping you evaluate your volunteering service
A comprehensive evaluation service to measure the impact of volunteering on patients, staff, volunteers and organisations and gain insight to drive improvement.
Helpforce’s Insight and Impact (I&I) service gives you the support and tools to gather evidence about your volunteering service: proving impact and helping you develop an even better service.
If you are already working with us on a project...
Working with our partners, we have:
Completed 85 evaluations
We use a consistent methodology to determine the impact of volunteering roles on health outcomes. Through working with our partners, we help them identify target outcomes for people and organisations involved, as well as support them in collecting necessary data to prove and evidence the outcomes.
Built a unique bank of over 430 evidenced outcomes
We continually gather evidences that prove how volunteers make a tangible impact on patients, staff, volunteers and the organisations. The evidences provide great insights into how volunteering services make a difference to people and organisations.
Helped 59 partner organisations secure over £4.5 million
Through delivering the evidence, our partners have been able to secure funding to sustain and scale their volunteering services.Our essential evidence
Our unique bank of evidence helps make the case for volunteering, identifies where we can innovate and builds understanding about how we can accelerate the growth of volunteering in health and care.
82%
of people agree volunteer support reduced their anxiety(n = 796, 14 organisations)
90%
of volunteers report that volunteering gives them a sense of purpose(n = 651, 28 organisations)
87%
of staff agree volunteers improve the quality of service they can provide(n = 662, 42 organisations)
How we help you
The I&I service has developed a straightforward, tried and tested process: Define, Design, Collect and Evaluate. We’ll support you through the process, working with you to evaluate your project:
Define
We will help you define the key objectives and beneficiaries of your volunteering service and identify the main audiences for your evaluation.
Design
Using our online tools, during the design stage, Helpforce works alongside you to decide what will be measured and how.
Collect
Using the data collection tools created specifically for your project, we will support you to collect data from your beneficiaries.
Evaluate the data
The I&I team will do the analysis for you and provide a dashboard or report of findings.
Working with us
We work on projects funded by ICSs, NHS trusts and community organisations to evaluate new or improved volunteering services.
Thanks to charitable trusts and other generous funders, we can sometimes provide evaluation support at no financial cost to you. Get in touch and we’ll see if this is something we’re able to do for your project.
I worked with the Helpforce Insight and Impact team on the evaluation of a discharge support volunteering pilot – they brought the evaluation expertise to our project. They helped develop our outcomes framework, design data collection methods and analysed results. The team provided excellent support with their online tool and were wonderful to work with.
Janice Malone, Volunteering Programme Manager, NHS Healthcare Improvement Scotland with responsibility for volunteering across the system
Proving impact - some recent evaluations
Find out more about Helpforce
Your Network
At Helpforce, we believe in the value of community and that’s why we created the Network, a free online peer community for professionals with an interest in volunteering in health and care to share your knowledge, learn from peers and find practical support and resources.
How we can help you
Helpforce works with organisations across health, care and the community to develop and evaluate services that optimise the difference volunteers can make.Here we explain how we can help you meet key challenges and the specialist services that allow us to do this.
About us
Volunteers are doing great things across health and care, in the NHS and in our communities – but volunteering is still not making the impact it could for patients, staff and on the system as a whole.Helpforce exists to make this happen. Here we explain how.
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