In this first part of our special on evaluating Volunteering for Health in Norfolk and Waveney, we meet Dr. Jurgen Grotz (Institute for Volunteering Research at the University of East Anglia) to discuss how we measure the impact of volunteering in health and care. We explore why evaluation matters, how to define success, and the importance of collaboration and respect for volunteers throughout the process.

Institute for Volunteering Research: https://www.uea.ac.uk/groups-and-centres/institute-for-volunteering-research

Volunteering for Health in Norfolk and Waveney: https://improvinglivesnw.org.uk/volunteering-for-health-norfolk-and-waveney/

Volunteering Discovery: nwicb.volunteering@nhs.net

Hello and welcome to Volunteering Discovery.

This is a podcast which takes you behind the scenes of

volunteering in health and care.

In Norfolk and Waveney volunteers enhance the experience of people accessing health

and care in a huge variety of ways in our hospitals, our communities, and even

from the comfort of their own homes.

In each podcast, we'll be hearing from those who give their

time supporting others and the people who work alongside them.

I am your host, Sarah, a volunteer coordinator working in the NHS.

Why not subscribe to this podcast to make sure you hear all of the

upcoming episodes in the series.

In this two-part special, we're diving into the evaluation of volunteering for

health in Norfolk and Waveney, a program that brings together innovation in

volunteering in the healthcare outcomes.

In this first episode, producer Jules is joined by Dr. Jurgen Grotz, director

of the Institute for Volunteering Research and Evaluation partner in the

program, helping the partnership to develop and undertake the evaluation.

Jurgen brings a wealth of experience in understanding how volunteering

contributes to health and wellbeing, and today we'll explore the purpose, approach

and early insights from the evaluation.

Whether you're a practitioner, policymaker, or simply curious about

the impact of volunteering in health and care settings, this conversation

will offer valuable perspectives on how we measure what matters.

Thank you very much for joining us today.

Could I start by asking you to please introduce yourself?

Who are you?

What is your role, and what is your connection to volunteering for health?

Well, first of all, thanks for inviting me, Jules.

I am Dr. Jurgen Grotz, and I'm the director of the Institute for

Volunteering Research here at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

Maybe I should say a little bit about what that institute actually is, as

the name suggests, uh, my main job is to undertake research, research about

everything to do with volunteering.

Now volunteering is a pretty big thing in society here in England.

If you ask 10 people on the street, more likely than not, seven or more

will tell you that sometime in their life, they have already volunteered.

They know what it is.

That means it's, it's common.

We find it everywhere, but that wouldn't tell us what difference it makes.

To the volunteers themselves, but also to the courses that they volunteer for.

That's sometimes where evaluations come in, and that's second

part of your question is what is my role in this project?

Obviously, my main job is doing research, but as part of that,

I've done many evaluations over the years evaluations, looking at

what difference volunteering makes.

And that's why I was invited to work with colleagues of this program to look at

how an evaluation could be undertaken.

Thinking about the evaluation of the volunteering for Health

program in Norfolk and Waveney, could you explain what an evaluation is

and what it means specifically in this context, which is looking at

volunteering connected with health?

An evaluation is.

Making a judgment, but at the very beginning, you have to decide what

you're making a judgment about.

I think in the majority of cases of the work that I'm involved in now,

it is a question of making a judgment about whether or not a program or an

activity actually makes a difference.

Now in order to do that, and that explains a little bit more of my role

within the program, is you have to ask yourself a number of questions,

and so you already know me as the one who's always asking awkward questions.

The first question here is, why do you actually want to evaluate.

What is this about?

What do you make a judgment about or who do you make that judgment for?

Is it because the funder has said you have to do it?

Is it because you want to make a case for more funding after the program

finishes, or is it about learning how to do that program better?

So there's a whole number of reasons why you want to evaluate,

and that reflects then as well how you undertake your evaluation.

That's the first awkward.

Now, the second really awkward question is, what do you actually

want to achieve with your program?

So at one of our initial meetings, I was asking the other partnership

members of the partnership what success for them would look like.

What do they want to have achieved in two, three years time with the funding,

with the activities of this program?

So what do we actually want to achieve?

That is a really important question.

And it is absolutely great that here in this program we have started to

ask this question at the beginning.

There's no point asking it later on when starting your evaluation

two thirds through the program.

So we are very well set up there for that.

But then the next stage, and this is, this is the.

Awkward questions that I'm currently asking.

This is about how do you actually get the information and what do you do to

make that judgment, to make an informed judgment, an evidence-based judgment.

People sometimes call it so.

The first thing here would be asking the question, where do we

actually get the information from?

And, and then maybe at the very same time, especially if we're talking

about volunteering in health and social care, is the information already here?

Do we, you know, do, do we, do we need to watch out that we don't duplicate?

And then also.

I guess looking at how we use that information and especially then later

on how we can share that information.

No point just collecting information, putting it all into a nice folder

saying we've collected all that information at the end and then

saying, you know, that's, that's it.

So those would be questions, awkward questions that I'm asking and that

sort of, I guess is my, my role.

Could you tell us in practical terms how you've gone about working

with the group to start to develop the idea of what success would look like and

therefore what we might need to measure?

Okay, so this is, and this is again where the, where it was really

nice that we started this very early.

We set up actually a group within the partnership to,

to consider the evaluation.

And we've already had a number of meetings and we spent those meetings systematically

working through those questions.

At the very first meeting, we were looking at why we, why we evaluate.

That was helping us.

Together with what we want to achieve with thinking about what we want

to achieve to establish the aim.

This helps us to look at the overall picture at the end.

What do we want to achieve with this?

What we would then sometimes refer to as impact's, difficult to

capture impact, but where we can certainly define some outcomes.

Something that is.

A direct result of the the program that isn't just what we

sometimes refer to as an output.

I say a little bit more about outputs in a minute, but we have been able,

as a group to work through the process of asking these awkward questions

to do that or to help with that.

I'm using what's called as a Theory of change approach.

I don't know whether it helps to, to speak a little bit to that.

The Theory of change approach helps us to start at the end, to define that

overall aim, to just define what we.

What we want to achieve and then slowly walk back or think backwards.

What do we need to to do to achieve that?

When individual steps, looking at outcomes outputs, and then actually looking at the

activities that we undertake to achieve those outputs, which then hopefully

lead to those outcomes and together help us to achieve our overall aim

at what stage?

Are we at in the evaluation process at the moment?

We've, we've got the theory of change, so that's just

a simple visual, uh, reflection of how we want to achieve that.

Uh, we also got all the necessary definitions.

So we've got our aim, we've got the objectives very clearly defined,

and really importantly, one of the first steps we've defined what we

are talking about, the activities that we think of as volunteering.

We've got all of that in place and what we're currently working on is

what we call an outcome framework.

That means we, we look at all the activities that we are undertaking.

We are looking at how.

They connect up to the outcomes that we want to achieve, and we ask questions

from the activities that help us hopefully to make a judgment on whether

or not we've achieved those outcomes.

And of course, we are not yet at the stage of gathering the data,

although we're very close to it.

But during this process, have you gained any insights or had any challenges so far?

I think the main insight that I have, and this is a nice, this is

really nice with this project, is the, the, the ownership that that

partnership members have taken of this.

No evaluator or nobody in my role can sort of make up the ideas of the outputs

or the particular measures that has to be owned by the people who actually.

Collect the data, who work with the data and who know what they want to

achieve overall, and this, this has been a real strength of this project,

that right from the beginning with key members of the network, we have been

working these things out together.

It is a collaborative endeavor, and I think that's the main achievement at

the moment in terms of the evaluation, that we get to the point where we

can test the outcome framework.

After a genuinely collaborative effort to get the outcome framework together.

How about challenges?

Well, the main challenge comes with my awkward questions.

You know, not everybody at the outset agreed on why we need an evaluation,

frankly, and uh, I think it's also fair to say that not everybody that was

necessarily having the same view on what we want to achieve at the end of this.

Now, we might still not have shared opinions on everything, but

we've got a shared understanding.

We are now evaluating the thing that we all know what we want to evaluate.

That will avoid disappointment at the end.

Because if somebody thinks we're evaluating X, but what we're actually

doing is evaluating y, then that does not look good at the end.

At the moment, we have achieved this sort of shared understanding, um, and it

was a bit of, well, that's why it takes time, and so it was a bit of a challenge.

It's difficult with point of time just to get everybody in a room.

To have the time to make these, to, to, to have these conversations

is really, really challenging.

But people have been willing to give their time and it's been great.

I'm skipping to the end now 'cause obviously there's still quite a

considerable period of the program to run where we'll actually be gathering the data

and, and starting the evaluation itself.

But if we do skip towards the end, having now worked out what the.

Outcome framework will be in having a theory of change, what do you

hope that the program team and our wider stakeholders will be able to

learn or use the final evaluation for at the end of the program?

I think you already used the main word here.

This the, the reason why we evaluate is learning, not just trying to

find out what we can learn about the things that we undertake.

That is quite an important part as well.

We're actually doing innovative, we are undertaking innovative activities to learn

whether or not they make a difference or not, or how they make a difference

or not, but the overall program.

It's about learning whether or not we can be better at achieving our overall aim.

It's important to remember here, the overall aim isn't just numbers.

You know, like more volunteers or more This, more that.

The overall aim is reflects the aim of the funder.

It's to test and if possible, show that people who don't usually.

Volunteer in health and social care can actually be involved, or

that those who are involved can be involved in different ways.

This is about showing and making sure that volunteers are seen to be

involved in health and social care in different and innovative ways.

If we can learn how to do that or how not to do that for that matter, then

that is the key part that I hope that people will take away at the same time.

And let me just add that every time I do this in partnership with people,

I hope that they also learn something about evaluating and about asking

the awkward questions themselves.

I don't always want to be the one who's asking the awkward questions,

but if they can then take that away, not just the learning from the program.

To actually go into the next program.

That's obviously a, I always hope that that happens.

Doesn't always, but take that into the next program.

But also for them to already at the next program level, to be able to think about

these evaluations themselves, to have that and that, that's one thing that I would.

Suggest is it reflects sustainability, sustainability of the program as well,

where we use the learning of the program to help define and, and, uh, create

the next program and where we use the learning from, about the activity

of evaluation to, to inform the next evaluation and to get, to make it better.

I've come to the end of my questions for today, but is there

anything else that you would like to add?

Is there anything else that you think our listeners should

know about this evaluation?

Well, the one thing that I would like to add is the, what I hope

is always part when we look at volunteer involvement, and that is the respect

of the volunteer and what they do, the volunteers achieve what they achieve.

Without being evaluated.

Sometimes despite being evaluated or they don't come to a place to fill in our

forms or to answer our questions, they come there to do what they want to do and

to, um, to, to help where they can help.

That, that respect is essential.

That does not mean that we can't ask questions, awkward questions,

or that we can't work together to find out the difference they make,

and they themselves will be very.

Interested in hearing about that difference and seeing how that works.

But all work and all evaluation in this context has to start with the

respect of the volunteer and the achievements that they actually make.

Thank you, Jurgen.

It would be great to talk to you again later in the, uh, the process

of the program to check in and see how well everything is going

and what learning we have so far.

But until then, thank you very much.

It's my absolute pleasure.

That brings us to the end of part one of our special

on evaluating, volunteering for health in Norfolk and Waveney.

A huge thank you to Dr. Jurgen Grots for sharing his insights into the

evaluation process and the importance of understanding the impact of

volunteering in health and care settings.

In part two, we'll hear from a member of the evaluation working

group and someone from the delivery team who has hands-on experience

in evaluating volunteer programs.

We'll explore how evaluation is being shaped collaboratively and what it means

for those involved in delivering and supporting volunteering in practice.

Stay tuned and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss the next episode.

Thanks for listening.

Please don't forget to subscribe, rate and review this podcast.

It all helps people find us and spread the word about volunteering.

This podcast was produced for the Norfolk Wave in the integrated care

system by Hospital Radio Norwich.

Hosted by Sarah Briggs, producer was Jules Orson.

Original music, composed and performed by Philip Aldridge, interviews

by Sarah Briggs and Jules Odeon.