Earlier this month, Starbucks hosted a Summit with leading corporations and international NGOs to discuss “Measuring the Value of Community Service”.  Mission Measurement facilitated this crucial discussion and helped tease out the social and business outcomes that corporate volunteerism advances.  Starbucks isn’t the first corporation or NGO to grapple with this question, but there are many challenges that have impeded a solution to measuring the value of corporate community service.  These challenges include comparing the value of different types of service, measuring beyond dollars spent or number of hours, measuring long-term impact, balancing quantitative and qualitative indicators and figuring out what we can attribute to a group of volunteers versus the larger efforts of the nonprofit working on an issue.

Despite these challenges, the group pushed forward to develop a common framework for measuring community service; the hope being that a common framework will help increase the scale and collaboration of current service programs, drive decision-making and facilitate communication.  During our workshop the group was able to break down the levels of impact of community service into: impact on the nonprofit, impact on the beneficiary, impact on the corporation and impact on the employee.  Identifying levels of impact is only the first step towards creating a common framework, the next step will be to develop metrics that correspond to each impact area.  While it will take great collaboration and thoughtfulness to create this framework, this initiative will be extremely valuable in helping to measure the unique value of volunteering.  Furthermore, measurement will help us understand in which instances there is a competitive advantage of volunteering versus providing NGOs with the resources to further their mission.  We can no longer afford to be in the dark regarding the impact and value we are creating.