Our History
The Volunteer Program Assessment (VPA) began as a partnership between the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and The Humane Society of the United States. With support from a Humane Society grant, a survey was developed and administered to 70 different volunteer programs. Based on findings from this large-scale survey, the team identified key drivers for volunteer engagement and commitment.
Today, the VPA is an online survey provided to volunteer coordinators to distribute to their volunteers alongside an experienced VPA consultant. Since its inception in 2009, the VPA has been administered to nearly 1,000 different organizations and has expanded to ten different university partners. Get to know some of our consultants who donate their time to work with VPA clients here.
Our Vision
Our vision is to help nonprofit leaders understand the strengths and weaknesses of their volunteer program from the perspective of their volunteers, and provide insights into the strategic management of their volunteer resources. The information collected from the survey speaks to a variety of individual and organizational outcomes particularly relevant to volunteer experiences. Every question and scale on the VPA survey comes from published research.
VPA strives to support the nonprofit community by providing scholarships for free volunteer assessment services that might otherwise be unavailable to nonprofit organizations and their leaders. To learn more about organizations we have worked with and how they have seen this vision come to life, please visit the “Our Clients & Testimonials” tab.