How to Measure the Social Value of Volunteering

"We volunteered 1,200 hours" is a fine number. But on its own it doesn't tell anyone what changed. Measuring the *social value* of volunteering is how you turn activity into impact your board, your employees, and your stakeholders actually feel.

What is social value?

Social value is the wider social, economic, and environmental benefit created by an activity — beyond its direct cost. For volunteering, it captures the real-world difference your team's time made, not just the hours logged.

It matters more than ever because social value is increasingly expected in procurement, ESG reporting, and stakeholder communication.

The three layers of measurement

Good measurement works in layers. Start simple, add depth.

### Layer 1: Inputs (the easy part)

These are the raw metrics every programme should track:

• Total [volunteer hours](/glossary/volunteer-hour)
• Number of participants
• Number of events
• Charities and causes supported

These are necessary but not sufficient. They show effort, not effect.

### Layer 2: Financial value (the hook)

Putting a pound figure on volunteer time makes the abstract concrete. There are two common methods:

Salary-based — Use employees' actual average hourly rate. The most rigorous method.

Average-rate — Use a national or sector average (commonly £15–£20/hour for general volunteering; skilled time is worth considerably more).

We cover this in depth in how to calculate the financial value of employee volunteering, and you can get a number in seconds with our volunteering social value calculator.

### Layer 3: Outcomes (the real story)

This is where social value lives. Outcomes describe what actually changed:

• Meals served, trees planted, people mentored, items collected
• People supported back into work
• Reduced isolation, improved skills, stronger community organisations

Outcomes are harder to capture but far more persuasive than any pound figure on its own.

Frameworks worth knowing

You don't need to adopt a formal framework to start, but it helps to know the landscape:

• **SROI (Social Return on Investment)** — Expresses social value as a ratio (e.g. £4 of social value per £1 invested). Rigorous but resource-intensive.
• **The UN SDGs** — Mapping activity to the 17 [Sustainable Development Goals](/glossary/sustainable-development-goals) is the most common approach for corporate programmes, and the easiest to report against.
• **National frameworks** — Tools like the Social Value Portal's TOMs are widely used in UK procurement.

For most companies, SDG alignment is the pragmatic starting point.

How to present it

The mistake is presenting one number in isolation. Layer them instead:

Weak: "We volunteered 1,200 hours."

Strong: "Our employees gave 1,200 hours — worth around £21,600 — across 47 events supporting 12 charities, contributing to SDG 3 and SDG 11, helping serve 4,000 meals and mentor 60 young people."

The hours are the input. The pound figure is the hook. The outcomes and SDGs are the evidence.

Making it sustainable

Measuring social value well is mostly about capturing the right data *as you go*, not reconstructing it at year-end. Tag each event to an SDG and an outcome type at the point of creation, log hours automatically, and the report writes itself.

That's the model With Kind Folk is built around: structured impact data from day one, and a board-ready report — hours, financial value, SDG breakdown, and outcomes — in a single click.