How can you evaluate volunteer impact on public botanical gardens?

1 Define your evaluation purpose and questions

Before you start collecting and analyzing data, you need to clarify why and what you want to evaluate. Your evaluation purpose should be aligned with your garden's mission, vision, and strategic plan, and should reflect the needs and interests of your stakeholders, such as funders, staff, visitors, and volunteers themselves. Your evaluation questions should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART), and should focus on the inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impacts of your volunteer program. For example, you might want to know how many volunteers you have, what they do, how satisfied they are, how they affect the garden's operations, finances, and reputation, and how they contribute to the garden's environmental, social, and educational goals.

2 Choose your evaluation methods and tools

Once you have defined your evaluation purpose and questions, you need to decide how you will collect and analyze the data to answer them. You can use a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, observations, document reviews, and case studies. You can also use existing tools or create your own, depending on your resources and capacity. For example, you can use the Volunteer Functions Inventory (VFI) to measure the motivations of your volunteers, the Volunteer Satisfaction Index (VSI) to assess their satisfaction levels, the Volunteer Impact Assessment Toolkit (VIAT) to evaluate their impact on your garden's outcomes and impacts, or the Volunteer Management Audit (VMA) to review your volunteer management practices.

4 Report and communicate your findings

The final step of your evaluation plan is to report and communicate your findings to your stakeholders and audiences. You should tailor your report format, content, style, and tone to suit their needs and expectations, and use clear, concise, and engaging language to convey your main messages and recommendations. You should also use visual aids, such as tables, charts, graphs, and infographics, to illustrate your data and highlight your key points. For example, you can use a logic model, a diagram that shows the relationship between your volunteer program's inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impacts, to summarize and communicate your evaluation results.