How can you measure the effectiveness of your volunteer onboarding program?

1 Define your goals

Before you can measure the effectiveness of your volunteer onboarding program, you need to define what you want to achieve with it. What are the specific outcomes and objectives that you expect from your new volunteers? How do they align with your organization's mission and vision? How will you communicate these goals to your volunteers and track their progress? By setting clear and realistic goals, you can create a framework for your onboarding program and measure its impact.

2 Choose your metrics

Once you have defined your goals, you need to choose the metrics that will help you measure them. Metrics are the indicators that show how well your onboarding program is performing and whether it is meeting your expectations. Depending on your goals, you can use different types of metrics, such as output metrics that measure the quantity and quality of work done by volunteers, outcome metrics that measure the changes and benefits resulting from their work, and satisfaction metrics that measure how happy and motivated volunteers are with their onboarding experience. For example, output metrics may include the number of hours, tasks, or projects completed; outcome metrics may include increased awareness, engagement, or satisfaction of beneficiaries; and satisfaction metrics may include retention rate, referral rate, or feedback surveys.

3 Collect your data

After you have chosen your metrics, it’s time to collect the data that will help you analyze them. Data is the information that you gather from volunteers, beneficiaries, or your own records to show how your onboarding program is working. To collect data related to your metrics, you can use surveys, interviews, and reports. Surveys are questionnaires sent to volunteers, beneficiaries, or other stakeholders to ask their opinions and experiences related to your onboarding program. Interviews are conversations with volunteers, beneficiaries, or other stakeholders to get more in-depth insights into their perspectives, challenges, or suggestions. Reports are documents created or received from volunteers, partners, or systems to show the results, activities, or achievements of your onboarding program.

4 Analyze your data

Once you have collected your data, analyzing it is essential to understand what it tells you about your onboarding program. You can use different tools to analyze the data, such as spreadsheets like Excel, Google Sheets, or Airtable; dashboards like Tableau, Power BI, or Google Data Studio; and statistical methods such as mean, median, mode, standard deviation, or t-test. With the right tools, you can organize and manipulate the data in tables, charts, or graphs; create and share interactive displays of the data; and measure the significance or correlation of the data.

5 Improve your program

After you have analyzed your data, you need to use it to improve your onboarding program. Improvement can be achieved by making changes, adjustments, or enhancements based on the findings, insights, or recommendations from your data analysis. Depending on your data, you can use different strategies to improve your onboarding program. Benchmarking is the practice of comparing your onboarding program's performance with other similar or best-in-class programs to identify gaps, strengths, or opportunities for improvement. Feedback is the practice of soliciting, listening, and responding to the opinions, experiences, or suggestions of your volunteers, your beneficiaries, or other stakeholders to improve their satisfaction, engagement, or retention. Experimentation is the practice of testing, measuring, and learning from different variations or alternatives of your onboarding program to optimize its effectiveness, efficiency, or impact.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?