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Why 69% of your employee volunteering programme is invisible to the people who matter most
By Vanessa Moscardo-Parker, Business Director, GoVo for Business
Employee volunteering · ESG reporting · Corporate social responsibility · Social value
Most organisations running a corporate volunteering programme share a quiet frustration: they know people are participating, they know it's making a difference, and they cannot prove it.
Not to their board. Not to a procurement panel. Not to the auditor who asks, politely but firmly, for the data behind the narrative.
Our research, conducted with Censuswide across 1,000 senior decision-makers and independently analysed by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr), found that 69% of employer-supported volunteering time in the UK goes unused. (1) Of the 31% that does happen, 40% of organisations are doing little or no evaluation of its impact (1).
This demonstrates that organisations are building the policy infrastructure to support corporate volunteering, without developing the systems needed to measure how it is delivered or the impact it achieves, and that gap is becoming a problem.
The measurement gap is not a values problem
It would be easy to read the 40% figure, four in ten businesses not evaluating their volunteering programmes, as a sign that organisations don't take this seriously. (1) In my experience, that's rarely the case.
The organisations I speak to care about their community impact. Many have passionate internal champions who have fought for volunteering policies, built relationships with charities, and organised genuinely meaningful activities for their teams.
The problem is almost always structural, not motivational. Volunteering programmes were built to enable participation. They are not always built to capture it. And the difference between those two things is significant.
When an employee spends a day mentoring at a local school or helping a food bank prepare for winter, that activity is real and the impact is real. But without a system of record at the point of participation (hours logged, cause recorded, social value calculated), none of it exists in a form that can be reported, verified, or defended.
Speaking with CSR and sustainability leaders at large financial institutions and retailers, I hear the same frustration repeatedly. They are already running volunteering programmes. They already have ESG targets. But when it comes to pulling together their social impact data, particularly for board reporting or investor disclosure, they find themselves piecing it together from multiple sources, none of which fully align.
What's been most valuable in those conversations is helping them realise that the data they need is already being generated by their volunteering activity. They just aren't capturing it in a usable form, particularly when it needs to be broken down by location, which matters when you need to report community impact to different regional stakeholders, or demonstrate local presence to a procurement panel.
Why the stakes are rising
Until recently, a well-crafted narrative about community engagement was sufficient for most ESG purposes. That is no longer the case.
PwC found that 60% of UK organisations identify social data quality as their biggest obstacle in sustainability reporting (2). The frameworks governing what 'good' looks like are tightening: GRI 413 (Local Communities) requires data, not stories.
The Procurement Act 2023, which replaced PPN 06/20 with PPN 002, currently sets a mandatory minimum 10% social value weighting in public sector contracts (4). That's about to rise: from 1 January 2027, PPN 026 lifts the minimum to 20% for central government contracts worth £5m or more, while contracts between £1m and £5m keep the 10% floor (4). On a £5m contract, that's the difference between 10% and 20% of the evaluation decided by evidence you can or can't produce: the commercial value of the scoring is about to double.
The question procurement panels and ESG auditors are now asking is no longer "do you have a volunteering programme?" It's "what value does it generate, and where?".
There is also a commercial case that often goes unmade internally. Our research found that full utilisation of employer-supported volunteering time could contribute £32.5bn to the UK economy annually, equivalent to £5,239 per professional or managerial employee per year (1). Most of that value currently cannot be claimed, because it exists in formats that don't hold up to scrutiny.
For a CSR or sustainability leader trying to make the case upward, that number matters. But it is only available to organisations that have built the infrastructure to generate it.
What good measurement actually looks like
The organisations that can evidence their volunteering impact (what our research calls Volunteer Leaders) are not necessarily the ones with the largest programmes or the biggest CSR budgets (1). They are the ones that made a specific set of structural decisions early.
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They capture data at the point of activity, not after it
Retrospective measurement is the most common trap in corporate volunteering. Attempting to compile social value figures from manager recollections, partial spreadsheets, and annual survey responses produces numbers that are neither accurate nor defensible. Volunteer Leaders capture participation at the moment it happens; hours logged by the employee on completion, cause and charity recorded automatically, social value calculated against a recognised methodology, in GoVo for Business's case via Thrive’s Impact Evaluation Standard (8).
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They make it accessible to the whole workforce
Just 19% of businesses with volunteering programmes offer them to all staff (1). The majority restrict access (by role, by location, by working pattern) in ways that are rarely explicit but significantly limit both participation rates and the scope of social value that can be claimed. A programme that reaches 30% of your workforce cannot support a full-organisation ESG claim. The organisations measuring well have resolved this by offering short-term, remote, and skills-based formats that work for office-based, hybrid, and frontline employees alike.
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They connect volunteering data to their reporting infrastructure before they need it
The worst time to build measurement into a programme is when an audit, a submission deadline, or a board question has already arrived. The organisations generating audit-ready impact data built the connection between their volunteering platform and their reporting calendar once, and it now produces verified evidence for every subsequent cycle automatically.
The self-assessment most CSR leaders haven’t done
Before investing in new initiatives, the most useful exercise is often the simplest: assess where your current programme actually sits across six dimensions of measurement maturity (1).
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Participation tracking:
Are you capturing it in real time, or reconstructing it afterwards?
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Social value calculation:
Are you applying a recognised methodology automatically, or not calculating it at all?
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Workforce coverage:
Does your programme reach all staff, or a subset?
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ESG reporting integration:
Does your volunteering data automatically feed into your disclosure reports (internal and/or external), or is it compiled manually?
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Management visibility:
Can line managers see their team's participation data and act on it?
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Audit readiness:
If asked today for a verified social value figure, could you produce one?
Most organisations with existing programmes sit in what our research categorises as the 'Basic' or 'Developing' range: they have a platform or a policy, but the data capture is incomplete and the reporting is manual (1). The organisations in the 'Advanced' range are generating audit-ready impact reports on demand, without significant internal resource.
The gap between those two positions is almost never explained by budget. It is explained by infrastructure.
The common mistakes that keep programmes stuck
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Measuring at launch, not over time
The first three months of a new programme typically generate the highest participation, driven by novelty and initial communications energy. Organisations that measure here see encouraging early data that declines through the following year. Sustained programmes build quarterly touchpoints, refresh opportunity catalogues, and create peer recognition mechanisms that maintain momentum beyond launch.
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Treating management endorsement as automatic
The single most consistent differentiator between high-uptake and low-uptake programmes is whether line managers actively encourage participation, not just permit it. A company-wide policy that is not reinforced at team level will plateau at 10–20% uptake, driven by employees who would volunteer regardless of management attitude. Active endorsement is not cultural: it is structural. It requires management briefings, visible recognition, and team-level reporting that gives managers the data to act on.
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Confusing activity with evidence
A volunteering day that happens without data capture is an activity. A volunteering day that happens with hours logged, cause recorded, and social value calculated is evidence. The difference between the two is invisible to the employee and invisible to the charity, but it is the entire difference between a programme that can support an ESG disclosure and one that cannot.
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Team days are the clearest example of this gap in practice
They are typically the highest-participation format available to organisations: a single day can generate more volunteering hours than months of individual activity, which makes them the single biggest social value opportunity in most programmes. They are also, in our experience, the activity most likely to be photographed, celebrated internally, and then entirely absent from any impact report. The hours happened. The evidence didn't.
Frequently asked questions
What methodology should we use to calculate social value from volunteering?
Community volunteering contributions in the UK are best evidenced using proxy values from established, recognised methodologies, drawing on HM Treasury Green Book guidance and research data (5) (8). These produce figures that can be independently verified and cited in procurement submissions and ESG reports. Ad hoc or internally devised calculations are unlikely to withstand audit scrutiny.
Does PPN026 change what we need to evidence?
PPN 002 (which replaced PPN 06/20 under the Procurement Act 2023, effective February 2025) currently sets the mandatory 10% social value weighting for public sector procurement (4). That baseline is changing: from 1 January 2027, PPN 026 raises the minimum to 20% for central government contracts of £5m or more (contracts from £1m to under £5m keep the 10% minimum) (4). PPN 026 is currently policy rather than law, applies specifically to central government contracts, and it isn't yet clear whether or how far local government and other public bodies will follow suit; further guidance on sub-criteria and implementation detail is due in autumn 2026.
The types of evidence panels expect have not changed fundamentally: quantified outputs, hours contributed, causes and locations supported, and a clear methodology for how social value was calculated. What has changed is the broader framework, with greater alignment to the National Procurement Policy Statement and Labour government priorities, and, with PPN 026 approaching, the size of what's at stake. If you are active in public sector procurement, reviewing your social value evidence against this timeline is increasingly important, particularly given the direction of travel toward more robust reporting requirements.
We already have a volunteering programme: do we need to start again?
Almost never. The most common requirement is adding measurement infrastructure to an existing programme, not rebuilding the programme itself. The participation is happening; the data is not being captured. Resolving that is a platform and process decision, not a cultural reset.
How long does it take to generate audit-ready social value data?
With the right infrastructure in place, social value figures can be generated from the moment participation begins. The challenge is that retrospective data collection (going back to capture activity that was not recorded at the time) is unreliable and resource-intensive. The practical answer is to start capturing correctly now, and within one full reporting cycle (typically 12 months), you will have a defensible evidence base.
The opportunity organisations are leaving unclaimed
Every organisation running a volunteering programme has already paid for it: staff time, paid volunteering days, the cost of running the scheme itself. The £32.5bn figure is what that spend is worth back to the UK economy when it's fully utilised (1). Most organisations are already carrying that cost. Not all of them are capturing the return.
That's a different problem to the one auditors and procurement panels raise. This isn't about defensibility, it's about whether you can point to your volunteering spend the way you'd point to any other budget line and say what it delivered. Marketing spend gets tied to pipeline. L&D spend gets tied to retention. Volunteering spend, for most organisations, gets tied to nothing measurable at all, even though the activity it funds is happening every week.
That gap has a competitive dimension too. Organisations that can quantify their return on volunteering spend have a stronger case for protecting or growing that budget when other budgets are under pressure. Organisations that can't are defending a cost with no return attached to it, which is a much harder conversation in any budget cycle.
The gap is closeable, and it isn't a bigger programme that closes it. It's the ability to show what the existing one is already worth.
Next steps
Our full research report. It examines what the data gap looks like in practice, how to self-assess your measurement maturity against a six-dimension benchmark, and the three actions that close the gap fastest.
Author
Business Director at GoVo for Business
Vanessa Moscardo-Parker is Business Director at GoVo for Business, Royal Voluntary Service’s employee volunteering platform. GoVo for Business is delivered by Royal Voluntary Service — a non-profit with over 85 years of volunteering experience, trusted by charities, funders, and public services across the UK.
Sources
- RVS / Cebr / Censuswide. The State of Corporate Volunteering in the UK, 2025.
- PwC. Global Sustainability Reporting Survey, 2024.
- World Economic Forum. ESG and Employee Engagement Survey, December 2024.
- UK Government. Procurement Policy Note 002 (superseding PPN 06/20), effective 24 February 2025; Procurement Policy Note 026, effective 1 January 2027.
- UK Government (DCMS) / London Economics, The Social Agency & New Philanthropy Capital. Estimating the economic and social value of volunteering. Published 11 July 2025.
- Pro Bono Economics. Triple Dividend: How Workplace Volunteering Can Make Us Happier, Healthier and More Productive, April 2024. (renumbered from 3)
- King's College London. Volunteering and Workplace Outcomes: A Systematic Review, 2025.
- Social value measurement via Thrive and the Social Value Portal.