Accepting volunteer value as partnership or match funding is a feature of major grant-making bodies such as the European Social Fund and British National Lottery Boards. They have a wide range of structures and volunteer roles, with volunteer numbers varying between 250 and 37,000. The results The organisations produced VIVA results which captured their major inputs into volunteers and outputs in terms of volunteer value. Each VIVA is valid for its organisation, but caution is needed when assessing the results and invidious comparisons should not be made which appear to judge one organisation as more cost-efficient than another. Rather, the different VIVA ratios reflect a great deal about different types of organisations, the role of volunteers and the ways volunteers are managed.
Most organisations multiply their investment between threefold and eightfold.
The average annual volunteer input is between 60 hours and 396 hours although there may be considerable variation among the time inputs of different types of volunteers within organisations. Average value per volunteer ranges between 339 and 3,621, and average cost per volunteer varies from 57 to 1,420. When volunteer expenditure is analysed over ten categories, some general patterns emerge, with a few outstanding differences distinguishing variations in organisations and practice. By far the most substantial investment is the payment of salaries of staff with volunteer management responsibilities, representing between one half and three quarters of expenditure in most organisations. Only where a substantial amount of volunteer management is done by other volunteers, such as in the National Trust and Scouting Nederland, is this percentage significantly lower.