A research project on what makes volunteering mean something.
We are gathering the first dataset large enough to answer the questions volunteer professionals have been asking for thirty years: what do volunteers actually want, and how does that change over a lifetime of service? MyImpactStyle is the front door.
A study, a framework, and a free tool, in that order.
MyImpactStyle is an independent research initiative studying connected service: the kind of volunteering that builds relationships, not just hours.
The MyImpactStyle assessment is one part of that work. It gives any volunteer language for who they are, while also contributing (anonymously) to a dataset that will, for the first time, let us describe the volunteer field from the inside out.
The framework is open. The tool is free. The data belongs to the field. No login, no email, nothing for sale.
Volunteering is being measured by the wrong things.
For decades, the volunteer field has been described almost entirely in management language: hours logged, shifts filled, retention percentages. That tells you who showed up. It doesn't tell you why, or what showed up with them.
The volunteer-of-record is also changing. Generations differ in what they want from service; the line between paid work and volunteer work is softening; the people doing the work look less like the people writing the policies. The stories the field tells about itself are twenty years out of date.
This project is a quiet attempt to update them, by asking volunteers, not their coordinators, what's true.
Better Impact pays for it. Nobody owns it.
Better Impact is the volunteer management platform that 65,000+ companies rely on to recruit, onboard, schedule, and report on the people who give them time. They fund this work but don’t direct its findings. The framework is published openly, the dataset stays anonymous, and the assessment will always be free, whether or not your program uses Better Impact.
It's how a category leader uses its position: by paying for the research the field couldn't justify on its own.
Find your style.
Five minutes, nineteen questions, no email. You get language for who you are. The field gets data it has never had.