Calculating the ROI of Your Volunteer Program – It’s Time to Turn Things Upside Down

It’s common wisdom in the business world that “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” In this feature article, author Tony Goodrow proposes a method of measurement that gives a whole new yard stick to help demonstrate the successes of volunteer deployment in organizations: Mission Points ROI. This special method to measure return-on-investment – which is what ROI stands for – quantifies the value of your volunteers’ involvement in ways the long-popular but insufficient wage replacement value never could. Goodrow argues that this “ROI model can help you demonstrate to everyone else a much more meaningful assessment of the worth of volunteer contributions and your ability to manage resources.”