Getting on Board is a charity that encourages and facilitates board-level volunteering, for the benefit of individuals, their employers, and the organisations they join.

The charity have had positive anecdotal feedback about their work from the companies and participants they have worked with, but wanted to better understand better the impact of their sign-posting work.

It was not possible, with the information available, for an economist to undertake a cost-benefit analysis of Getting on Board’s work, but we were fortunate to find a social researcher with the right expertise to whom we could hand over the project. Simon Pannell employed qualitative research methods to obtain rich data on volunteers' experiences of obtaining and maintaining board roles. This data has directly informed advice to the charity on what information to gather from participants, and how, to allow better monitoring and evaluation of the scheme.

Sarah Hodgkinson, founder of Getting on Board, told us:

 “We are very grateful to Simon for all the painstaking work that he has done on this project. It will undoubtedly help us with our evaluation and enable us to improve the service we offer."

20th June 2014