Are you including the value of volunteering in your grant applications?
More than six million people in Australia volunteer through organisations across the nation. Millions more volunteer informally in their local communities, helping neighbours and strangers, especially in times of crisis and adversity (Volunteering Australia National Volunteer Week Key Messages).
Allocating a dollar value is a necessity when calculating your organisation’s in-kind contribution to a project. In fact, it should be part of your strategic planning to keep track of your organisation’s volunteer input. (Check out the Victorian Government’s In-Kind Contributions Worksheet for an example of how to track these hours.)
Valuing volunteers for in-kind contributions
Putting a dollar figure on something delivered in-kind makes the ‘worth’ of that resource more tangible. To that end, estimating the dollar value of your volunteer program is an important metric you should consider measuring and tracking. This information can be used:
- In annual reports and social impact reports to publicly demonstrate the importance of your volunteers to your organisation’s work
- To inform your strategic planning, project planning and resourcing, and risk mitigation policies
- To signal to key stakeholders and the broader public that your organisation is a trustworthy, grassroots provider that is well-entrenched in its local community
- In grant funding applications where in-kind contributions are included in project budgets (More broadly, in-kind contributions such as volunteer support are usually categorised as co-funding and are viewed favourably by funding organisations.)
Calculating the value of your volunteers’ contribution does not have to be complicated.
The Centre for Volunteering has this handy cost of volunteering calculator, where the ‘cost’ of a volunteer is calculated using the average hourly part-time wage in their state of residence, plus 15% employer on-costs:
https://www.volunteering.com.au/resources-tools/cost-of-volunteering-calculator
If you are a volunteer donating 20 hours of your time a month, the annual value of your contributions is over $13,000 (or, in other words, this is the cost to replace your volunteer should they no longer be able to donate their time).
If you’re wondering how to incorporate the justification in the budget of your grant application, you can include something like “These in-kind figures are based on wage rates as calculated by The Centre for Volunteering cost of volunteering calculator: https://www.volunteering.com.au/resources-tools/cost-of-volunteering-calculator/.”
Calls for more government support
Volunteering has been overlooked in the latest Federal Budget with no new measures for the volunteering ecosystem.
Volunteer Australia continue to advocate for volunteer support, saying “Volunteer involving organisations remain under immense pressure with no support. We cannot take Australia’s volunteers for granted. Strategic investment in volunteering is crucial to safeguard its contribution to communities, and to ensure it is sustainable.” Read their full Federal Election Platform here.
It’s critical, now more than ever, to support the volunteers who are vital to the For-Purpose sector.
We’d love to know – are you including the value of volunteer contributions in your grant applications?
Strategic Grants has the most comprehensive funding data and funding insights in Australia and NZ collated since 2009—a sustainable and ever-growing resource that can help inform and enable collaboration and decision making to improve community outcomes for all. Find out more about GEMS (Grants Expertise Management System) here.