April Update: Your Volunteering Impact
This month as we wrap up the majority of our projects, we’re starting to think about the impact of our work. As a national charity, the impact of our projects in how we benefit our student volunteers and beneficiaries is a huge part of what we do. But in order to collect this information, we need your help!
What’s impact important for?
By collecting data on the impact of our projects, we are able to show our student volunteers, our community partners and our funders exactly what we have achieved this year. This can help us secure new partners, new funders, and expand our projects to even more students at the University of Southampton.
It also means across the Student Hubs network, we can collect information from all seven Hubs to show that the projects we share (eg Schools Plus, Empower, Branch Up) are all showing similar impact and achieving their aims as projects.
How can I help as a student volunteer?
We need you to support us with filling out your end of project feedback for all projects which you have been involved with, providing case studies and giving us more information about the amount of beneficiaries you engaged with over the course of your volunteering experience.
Email our new staff member Natalie Rowell, Volunteering Support Officer, to get involved with case study interviews and our reflection sessions.
These sessions are being run by Natalie with the purpose of getting all volunteers who’ve taken part in our projects thinking about how they can take the Hub experience and use it when writing their CV, job applications, conducting job interviews and for their personal development.
How will we know our feedback matters?
Your feedback is incredibly important to us: it helps us shape our projects; change things which aren’t going right; and let to our community partners know how we can improve the student volunteers’ experience. For mid-year feedback, several projects had a report about the actions we would take following your feedback and we aim to produce another report for all students about what we’re going to do following your feedback in June.
When’s the deadline?
We are aiming to have collected most feedback by Monday 28th May. For University of Southampton students we’re aware that exam period is looming, so expect lots of impact activity from us in the next few weeks!
How can I find out more?
If you’ve got any questions specifically around impact, get in touch with Natalie Rowell, Volunteering Support Officer for Southampton Hub.
That’s it for April! Keep up to date with our Facebook, Twitter and our website in the meantime for any updates, including those reflection sessions, and we look forward to seeing you all in May.