Is Assigning a Financial Value to Volunteering a Good Idea?

When a volunteer manager/coordinator considers measuring the value of volunteers, the first impulse is to measure the economic value to the organisation. Many managers (and I’m trying not to over generalise here) have backgrounds in finance, economics and commerce, and the training they receive concentrates on monetary impacts. The best way to get their attention is to talk $$$!! It can certainly be an eye opener when you show management the dollar value of what volunteers contribute to services each month. Comparing the contribution of volunteers to the cost to recruit them will often close mouths that once complained that no volunteer is free!! Following the monetary reports with social impact reporting helps to first get the attention of others, then to educate them in the other values (social, emotional) that volunteers have in the community as well as the individual organisations. In agreeance with L. Mollberg, managers and other social groups do take notice after being shown the dollar value of volunteer contribution. As they say, sometimes you need to talk the talk.

Your roundtable has done an excellent and thorough job of laying out the complexity of this issue. I read with interest as the University of Minnesota has a very active mentor program, matching about 1600 alumni and professionals with students annually. In response to demands for measurable outcomes from administration related to alumni relations, I recently found myself calculating the hours and monetary value of time donated by mentors. I must say, once those numbers were shared with administration, they finally began to take notice. Since then there has been more attention paid to the added values and significance of these volunteer relationships in terms of cultivating relationship capital and social capital, new ways to enhance the student experience that grow out of mentoring including corporate and organization relationships to more innovative learning practices. So far, this type of accounting has been beneficial but your dialogue will cause me to think with greater depth about this issue. For now, it seems that there may be a time and place for this practice. The trick is to not emphasize financial value of volunteers over the myriad of other positive, and significant outcomes related to volunteering. Thank you for an excellent and provocative discussion.

I agree that giving a monetary value to volunteering is not the whole story. But my Executive looks at what the agency puts out in terms of supplies, meals, travel, etc. for our volunteers. She needs to weigh that against the added value of the work of the volunteers to the agency. We have used the Independent sector's figures, although they are actually higher than our staff's wages so we have decreased it to our staff levels for a comparison. The Volunteers ALWAYS give more than they "cost" the agency. The fact that they double the agency's service to the community is a fringe benefit that is difficult to express in monetary terms.

Laurie Mook said, "Yet, in Canada and the US, volunteers contributed hours that were equivalent to almost ten million full-time jobs!" I cringed when I read this. It's these kind of statements that volunteer managers very much need to avoid. Funders can (and will) say, "Great, let's save some money by cutting staff in half and filling the positions with volunteers." Or lower paid staff can look at the monetary figure assigned to volunteer time and be upset that this hourly figure is more than they make -- does this mean that volunteers are more "valuable" than full-time staff? Or union representatives can say, "oh, so you look at volunteers as a way to not hire people?" Stressing these monetary values alone, or promoting them as the primary value of volunteers is, indeed, quite harmful. While I do think we need to include information that relates volunteer contributions to monetary values in some way, I think that "value" of volunteerism needs to be balanced with much more realistic and meaningful measurements.