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Thursday May 17, 2007
Vital statistics
The volunteering world is ever so slightly obsessed with statistics. Funders always want to know who's doing what and why they're not doing more, and organisations want to show who they're reaching and who might be susceptible to a new campaign.
For years the most authoritative study was the National Survey of Volunteering, by the Institute for Volunteering Research (IVR). Conducted every ten years, it's a major survey based on random face-to-face interviews. The key finding of the most recent version was that 48% of the population had taken part in 'formal volunteering' (ie with an organisation) in the previous 12 months.
That figure always seemed very high to me. Can almost half of the population really volunteer every year? However, the Home Office Citizenship Survey 2003 (pdf) came up with a similar figure of 42% of the population doing formal volunteering.
What then are we to make of a new survey by The Samaritans? It found that "Many young people had thought about volunteering, but few had acted on it: 65.4 per cent of 16-24 year olds have thought about helping their community in their spare time, but only two per cent actually turn out and volunteer."
That's right, two per cent. Two!
Figures for young people volunteering have always been slightly lower than for the rest of the population, but the 1997 National Survey still found that 43% of all 18-24 year-olds undertook formal volunteering.
Clearly something is very different in the methodology. Yet if I ask myself how many people I know actually do formal volunteering, the percentage is probably close to what the Samaritans came up with.
Does any of this matter? Well, the focus on young people volunteering in recent years stemmed from a reported fall in their participation found by the 1997 National Survey. And no doubt organisations like v will be conducting surveys to find out how much impact their work has achieved.
A tip: if your organisations wants to show the impact of its work, use the Samaritans methodology before a project starts and then later switch to the IVR approach to demonstrate how much volunteering rates have increased.
Posted by Tom Green ( 9:48 AM ) Link to this post Comments[1]
Posted by Articles on November 24, 2007 at 07:26 AM GMT+00:00 #