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Volunteers saved PDSA £10.3m last year 1

Finance | Tania Mason | 10 Mar 2009

Veterinary charity PDSA has put the value of its volunteer force at £10.3m during 2008, up from £8.5m three years ago.

The figure was arrived at by counting the numbers of hours contributed by volunteers and estimating how much the charity would have had to pay them if they were paid staff. In total during 2008, more than 4,800 volunteers clocked up 1.25 million hours.

The majority of volunteers are deployed in the charity’s 178 shops, but there are also others who run fundraising events, help out in the offices, act as trustees, or provide assistance in the hospitals.

Janet Compton, the charity’s head of volunteering, said each volunteer role is assigned an equivalent PDSA salary for the purposes of the calculation exercise. “We try and do it as scientifically as possible,” she said. “We even grade the volunteer roles for this purpose and give each department a number of different grades, then we calculate the hourly rate we would have to pay each one.

“We always underguess rather than overguess too – for instance within our own staff pay scales we have incremental levels, and we make sure that we grade 60 per cent of our volunteers at the base level and 40 per cent at the second level.”

If the charity was to employ staff in those roles, it would also have to pay added costs like National Insurance, recruitment expenses, and pension contributions, so it takes an average of these for each role and adds that to the volunteer calculation as well.

If each volunteer hour had been valued at the national minimum wage, the annual calculation would have been £8.5m, but calculated at the comparable PDSA hourly rates, it rose to £10.3m.

Return on investment of 22:1

Involving volunteers is not without cost - PDSA has a dedicated volunteer centre to administer all its placements, including providing training; it reimburses all volunteer expenses, and it devotes an allowance to throw parties for its volunteers during Volunteer Week and at Christmas. Last year those costs came to £471,000, delivering a return on investment of almost 22:1.

PDSA used Volunteering England’s Volunteer Investment and Value Audit tool to make the calculation.

The charity includes the volunteer value figure in its annual review, but not in its annual report, or anywhere on its balance sheet. Compton thinks it should be recognised there, but accepts it is not common practice. “It is a saving, and when there is so much scrutiny on charities to demonstrate how well they are managing their income, we should be able to include it somewhere.”

Compton said she now plans to measure the volunteer value every other year. “Hopefully we will reach £12m by 2012,” she said.

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