Social Care and Health Department, The City of Edinburgh Council 1

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1 Social Care and Health Department, The City of Edinburgh Council 1 The Social Care and Health Department of the City of Edinburgh Council has used the Volunteering Impact Assessment Toolkit twice to examine the part played by volunteering within adult services. The assessments were driven by the department s Volunteer Coordinator/Development Officer, Rachel Henry, whose post was created about three years before the case study was written, to develop a more strategic approach to the involvement of volunteers. Measuring and representing the contribution of volunteers was a huge challenge, which was why Rachel seized upon the toolkit when it first became available and subsequently attended the training session provided by the Institute for Volunteering Research and Volunteer Development Scotland (VDS) (now called Volunteer Scotland). Speaking of the toolkit, she said: What I liked about it when I saw it was that it starts to give a language for understanding and representing what volunteering can and does do. Deciding to undertake a volunteering impact assessment The assessments focused on: North East Edinburgh Support Services (NEESS), where there is a long tradition of involving volunteers in supporting adults with learning disabilities Moose in the Hoose, an innovative partnership project of the Social Care and Health Department, Age Concern Edinburgh information technology (Aceit) and RSVP (CSV s Retired and Seniors Volunteer Programme). The 14 Moose volunteers were coordinated by the project team and linked to four of the council s residential care homes and two voluntary sector sheltered housing schemes. The volunteers made weekly visits to the units and were trained to provide friendly, regular and sustainable support and encouragement for residents and tenants to access the computer equipment on site. Moose in the Hoose was a pilot project at the time of the assessment and firmer information about its impact was needed to support an application for further funding. The NEESS assessment, carried out in April 2006, was on a very small scale and undertaken with great speed. It was devised in response to a request from VDS, which was looking for case studies to include in an information pack on the toolkit. This work was carried out in conjunction with The Scottish Executive (now called the Scottish Government), and the timing was linked to a speech on volunteering by the first minister. A window of just six days was available to carry out and write up the research, but the opportunity provided the impetus to test out the toolkit Despite these pressures, the study produced a surprising amount of useful information and encouraged Rachel to embark on the assessment of Moose in the Hoose the following December. 1 This case study was conducted in 2007 and reports on how the organisation used the first edition of the toolkit.

2 Planning and carrying out the assessment Rachel found the toolkit matrix invaluable in the very early stages in helping to think through the potential impact of volunteering: For me personally, the idea of being able to look across different areas of impact from a range of different positions, was a very helpful one. It offered a way of starting to describe systematically something that is often represented only anecdotally. NEESS The time pressures on the first assessment meant that it had to be planned and run very quickly. Knowing the staff in the NEESS team helped enormously (Rachel had formerly shared the post of volunteer manager) and the work was managed in a very pragmatic and responsive way. Younger volunteers and staff (managers and day centre officers) at NEESS were selected as stakeholders and they were asked to complete the relevant core and supplementary questionnaires. It was decided not to involve the service users, all of whom had learning difficulties, because the careful work needed to assist their contribution was not feasible in the time available. Moose in the Hoose The original plan was that the impact assessment would be carried out independently by a self-advocacy group for care home residents. The rationale was that people from outside the three partnership organisations would be more likely to be viewed by the respondents as honest brokers. However, this arrangement broke down because of illness, and a student subsequently taken on to do the work also withdrew. The only option was for Rachel to carry out the assessment herself. Three groups of stakeholders were selected: volunteers; staff and residents/tenants from the care homes; sheltered housing schemes. The core questionnaires from the toolkit were used for each group. The volunteers were happy to be sent questionnaires but Rachel felt that a more direct approach would be needed for the service users and staff. She visited each unit and gathered responses from the users, singly or in small groups, through a combination of assisted questionnaire filling and informal conversation around the questionnaire themes. Most of the staff filled in a questionnaire but they were also offered the option of an informal interview. This degree of flexibility was felt to be important for maximising the response but it was quite time consuming: the process of sending out questionnaires and conducting the interviews took about a week. Very little adaptation of the questionnaires was required. Questions were simply left out if not applicable. For example, a question about improved employability was not relevant to the service users or to the volunteers, who were themselves retired. For the NEESS assessment, Rachel had found the supplementary questionnaires useful in clarifying responses to key questions. For the Moose research, however, she felt that the simplicity of the core questionnaires would be more appropriate because of its larger scale and the need to limit the demands on stakeholders from the partner agencies.

3 Analysing and presenting the findings NEESS The NEESS assessment achieved four responses from staff (two managers and two day centre officers) and one from a volunteer. Manual analysis was appropriate for this tiny number, and the findings were initially presented in a two-page report for internal distribution. A brief written summary of the traffic light results for the staff and volunteer questionnaires was given (almost all were green) and some issues arising from the staff responses were discussed. There had been an interesting split between the day centre officers and the managers in their perceptions of volunteer impact. Both had a very positive view of volunteer involvement, but the former seemed to place greater value on its human, social and cultural benefits while the latter tended to focus on the physical 2 and economic impacts. Although this finding was necessarily tentative because of the small number of responses, it demonstrated that even a very small piece of systematic research can raise interesting and important questions. In Rachel s words: You can get some really useful stuff even if it s not perfect. Moose in the Hoose The responses from the Moose in the Hoose assessment (37 completed questionnaires and 13 semi-structured interviews) were also analysed manually. Rachel did this herself but, looking back, felt that some of this task could have been shared, provided that the confidentiality of individual responses was safeguarded. Analysing and writing up the findings took about one and a half days. Rachel chose to use the traffic light scoring system from the toolkit to present the quantitative results. The overall findings were summarised at the beginning by means of a grid, which plotted the three stakeholder groups against the five different capitals, with the appropriate traffic light (in this case, mainly green and a few amber) in each cell. The stakeholders answers to the questions from each of the core questionnaires were then presented in expanded grids, again using the traffic light indicators. Although the traffic lights simplified the presentation of the results and made an immediate visual statement, Rachel later felt that their impact might have been diluted by using them to present the detailed results: One set of traffic lights is really powerful but pages and pages of them cease to be so, especially when they re all green and amber. Another danger of this approach is that it makes working with volunteers look very easy and may lead others to underestimate the complexities of establishing a successful project. The qualitative findings were presented in the second part of the report. Using each type of capital as a heading, comments from the different stakeholders were grouped together. Under human capital, for example, quotes from service users, volunteers and staff demonstrated the various benefits that they had identified, such as Keeping your brain cells moving (service user) and Friendship, increase of confidence, learning curve on many levels (volunteer). In order to balance this largely positive appraisal, comments from the stakeholders about any difficulties or disadvantages they had encountered were then presented, and their ideas for the future summarised. In writing the conclusions, Rachel was aware of the challenge of ensuring 2 In the third edition of the toolkit physical capital has been replaced by satisfaction in the tools.

4 that her observations were firmly based in the research evidence rather than in her prior knowledge of the project. Resources Rachel s time was the key resource. The nature of her post gave her the flexibility to manage each stage of the two assessments and to prioritise the work. The time she invested was approximately two days for the NEESS assessment and six days for Moose in the Hoose. The volunteer manager at NEESS also played a role in implementing the first assessment (approximately one day of his time). Other costs mainly printing and postage were minimal. Dissemination The NEESS report was circulated within the City Council but was adapted as a case study by VDS for an information pack that promotes the use of the toolkit across volunteer-involving organisations. This provided Rachel with a valuable external endorsement of her work and she felt that it also helped to raise the profile of volunteering within the council. The Moose in the Hoose report was sent to senior departmental managers as part of a request for continued funding, and a decision was subsequently made to provide further funding of 24,000 for the project. This decision was not explicitly linked to the impact assessment but informal feedback suggested that the evaluation evidence was helpful. The project could not have continued without a new injection of funding. At the time of writing, a glossy report on the Moose in the Hoose project was also going to be produced in conjunction with RSVP and Aceit for more general circulation. Reflecting on the process Rachel identified a number of learning points from the assessments. It is possible to use the toolkit do something really useful in a short time. Just getting on and doing it is worthwhile. It is fine to customise the toolkit, for example by adding selected questions from the supplementary questionnaires to the core questionnaires. Using the toolkit for relatively small-scale evaluations has been useful preparation for larger-scale use. There was a lot of learning from these initial pieces of work that would help them to use the kit with more confidence and to greater effect in the future. Taking part in the research may not be a priority for stakeholders, particularly staff. Expectations need to be realistic and carefully negotiated. Parts of the process could be shared for example, questionnaire design and analysis without compromising the integrity of the research. Having completed the two project-based assessments, Rachel planned to use the toolkit with volunteers and volunteer managers across the Social Care and Health Department. She was convinced of the toolkit s capacity: to bring out and quantify some of the softer measures which demonstrate that volunteering has a very significant role to play in social care and social well-being.

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