Measuring the impact of your work with volunteers can be difficult. It involves lots of moving parts and stories that are difficult to quantify.

Ripple effect mapping is a technique that is designed to capture the ‘ripples’ of impact that are hard to measure by traditional methods or that don’t happen immediately. It’s participatory and interactive, adaptable to unique contexts and, best of all, it’s really easy to do!

This session will be an introduction to the Ripple Effect Mapping technique, with some time reserved at the end for you to start making your own map. The activity works best if you can bring a small group of people (2-4) from different roles in your organisation/group to plot the changes and impacts together, so that you have a variety of perspectives feeding in. Include volunteers if possible!

What is Ripple Effect Mapping? 

• Ripple Effect Mapping is a qualitative research method.

• It is useful for gathering data from complex systems where the impacts of changes might be unpredictable - like the voluntary sector! 

• People come together for interactive data-gathering workshops. 

• In groups, people work to make visual maps of the activities and changes that have been made, and try to track the impacts - intended and unintended, big and small, obvious and hidden, good and bad, on individuals and on communities - of these changes. 

• Workshops are interactive and hopefully fun! 

Why attend this session? 

• Get introduced to a new method of impact analysis. 

• Identify the progress that your group/organisation has made towards your volunteering goals

• See the results of your hard work!