What are the advanced social impacts?

Long-term social impacts include:

• Repeat volunteers
• Enhanced perception of self
• Skills development and career progression

Whereas intermediate-level skills and volunteering impacts focused on intent to change behaviour, advanced impacts in this area try to consider whether any such behavioural change has occurred.

Repeat Volunteers

Tracking the same people surveyed immediately after the event, it will be possible to follow up with them to determine how many converted an intent to volunteer again with action. Event organisers and, in particular volunteer managers, will be able to supplement this with qualitative reviews of how people’s volunteering activity has progressed within a particular activity.

Enhanced Perception of Self

This will require some pre-event measure to act as a baseline, which may be as simple as asking people a set of questions developed to determine how they perceive themselves, and then following this up sometime after the event.

Skills Development and Career Progression

Establishing a link between volunteering at an event and the ability to gain employment or progress within a career is challenging.

Understanding the impact of volunteering on career progression is complex to measure and difficult to determine exact cause. It is known that events do not occur in a vacuum and interviewing someone 6-12 months post event gives plenty of time for other factors to influence this area.

In reality, measuring the impact of an event on people’s employability and career progression is probably a major piece of research.