If you manage a volunteer program, it’s important to be able to show the results of the program.

When it comes to volunteering and volunteer programs, “success” can be an elusive target.  What makes a project successful?  Is it the number of volunteers that show up?  Maybe it’s the hours of work contributed to a project.  What about the number of people impacted by the work?  How do you know if your project was a success?

Define what success means. Whether a successful project is one where all of the volunteers who signed up came or if it means that a certain number of clients were served by the project, what “success” means needs to be defined so that you can report that the project was successful.

Measure success. Once you’ve defined what success means, you need to determine how you’re going to measure success. This is a two pronged approach:

• Decide how to measure success. How you measure the success of a project depends on how you define success. If your definition of success is the number of trees planted or meals served, then a count will tell you if you’ve reached your goal. If your definition of success isn’t so concrete, you’ll have to find a way to measure the impact of your project that can help to point to whether the project was successful.
• Decide if your measure is appropriate. If success means that you planted all of the trees that were donated to your project, and you count the number of trees that were planted, your measure is appropriate. If success means that a certain percentage of volunteers showed up to the project, and you’re counting the number of trees planted, then you might want to rethink what you’re measuring.

Plan for success! Success doesn’t just happen, no matter how easy some people make it look. There’s a lot of planning involved to make any volunteer project successful. Need some planning tips to help you have a successful project? Check out these posts!

Share the success! Don’t keep your successes in the dark. Let everyone who is related to your organization know about your successful projects, and turn it into an opportunity to invite people to your next project. Don’t just let your volunteers know about the work that they did; let your board know, let your funders know, let people who have donated know.

If you’re looking for some help defining and measuring your project’s success, check out the Assessment and Evaluation section of our Tools and Resources library!

Today’s Points of Light Blog talks about the importance of measuring the impact of volunteer programs, and the National Conference on Volunteering and Service blog post highlights the sessions that will give you the opportunity to learn more about managing volunteer projects for success.