Investing in volunteering: measuring social returns of private investments in volunteer recruitment, training and management activities

Increasingly third sector organizations rely on volunteer work for the performance of important tasks. This obviously reduces their human resources costs by cutting salaries expenses but, on the other hand, it also requires that some resources are spent for the recruitment, training, and management of volunteers. This is especially true in a context where nonprofit organizations (NPOs), while trying to reduce their costs, are making an effort to increase their levels of professionalization and overall efficiency. The investment made by NPOs on volunteering is often overlooked because of the gratuity of the service provided by volunteers. However, a careful analysis of this investment and its social returns would be highly beneficial because it would shed light on a number of positive externalities and social values created by the organizations when investing in volunteer work. In fact, by investing in volunteering, organizations create value not only for themselves and the users of their services, but also for the volunteers and for society at large. We believe that a fair representation of the social return of the “volunteer investment” is necessary to correctly report to the stakeholders the “real” value of third sector organizations. This analysis may also contribute to improve directly the organization’s efficiency and sustainability. In this context, our aim is to develop a methodology to capture and highlight the broad socio-economic value that third sector organizations produce through their volunteer recruitment, training, and management activities. Considering such activities as a proper investment, we try to apply the Social Return on Investment (SROI) methodology and therefore to value such social returns in monetary terms. The final aim is to calculate the social return of each unit of investment made by the organization in the process of “production” of volunteers. This will allow us to show how third sector organizations, by investing in volunteering, create positive socio-economic impact and contribute to strengthening or consolidating virtues and ideals of civil commitment in the society. In this paper we will discuss a first attempt made to operationalize this approach and to apply the “SROI of the volunteer” to an Italian NPO case (the Association Dynamo Camp Onlus) characterized by high and diversified investments in volunteering-related activities.