My Thoughts on v’s Formative Evaluation

Too often, evaluation reports are briefly heralded before being confined to the dusty annals of an organization’s history alongside a collection of annual reports from yesteryear. At Vinspired, learning has always been an intrinsic part of our DNA, and while we will never profess to having all the answers, we are always prepared to learn from our experiences. It is for this reason that I have written an Afterword for the evaluation, which represents both a reflection on our impact and a valuable reference point for our future.

This report offers significant insight for all, and we hope you will take the time to absorb it. The findings are helping us to shape our future activities by building on strong foundations and enhancing areas we can improve. We have learned a great deal about our impact but, more importantly, what we need to do to be able to tell an even more persuasive story.

Our social return on investment ratio of £5.80 for every £1 invested is robust and compelling, yet it only relates to a fraction of our overall impact. Collectively, we have to improve how we monitor the personal impact of young people’s volunteering journeys, particularly over the longer term.

We need to strengthen the case for the role that volunteering plays in boosting employability and developing key capabilities which help young people succeed and flourish. We must persuade a broad cross-section of investors that continued investment in opportunities for young people will aid our communities, help our economic recovery, and assist those experiencing the negative and damaging impacts of high youth unemployment. We need to devise and develop new ways of measuring the community impact that these opportunities generate, shifting away from anecdotal stories toward a more robust and quantifiable evidence base. This is a challenge we all must rise to.

We are proud of our achievements including creating and filling over one million volunteering opportunities, engaging a diverse range of young people within which no group was under-represented, and improving the quality of their volunteering experience, but of course, there is more to do.

The financial climate is certainly more challenging now than at any time in the recent past, but there has never been a more important time to dedicate resources to accurately measuring impact. I can testify that we have learned as much about how to collect data as we have from the data we collected, and I can vouch for the power of an iterative evaluation approach in changing our organization for the better.

As Vinspired embarks on delivering its new five-year plan, we will build on what we do best: developing the confidence and self-esteem of the young; building their capabilities for work; helping them to turn their passions and cares into enterprises that bring about change for the better; and inspiring them to become fully engaged citizens and leaders of the future.

My thoughts on v’s formative evaluation
Emerging findings show Team v has had positive impact
The impact of v: interim findings