The State of Volunteer Service.

A research instrument first. A report second.

The volunteer-management field operates on remarkably thin empirical foundations. Most of what we “know” about why volunteers stay, why they leave, and what makes a program retain comes from small self-report studies, anecdotal experience, or vendor whitepapers. The largest open dataset on volunteer motivation ever published has on the order of two thousand respondents.

MyImpactStyle is targeting ten thousand. Anonymous, opt-in, openly released. Every respondent who takes the five-minute quiz quietly contributes to a research instrument designed to give the field a shared empirical baseline.

Three reports across the first eighteen months.

• Oct 2026V1

  The State of Volunteer Service

  The flagship report. National-scope volunteer-motivation distribution: how the six MyImpactStyle types distribute across age, tenure, organizational type, and region. Bridging Index findings on cross-difference contact in the volunteer sector. Service Orientation distribution by cohort. Methodology, full dataset summary tables, raw aggregate counts.

• Q1 2027V1.1

  The Coordinator's Companion Report

  Practitioner-facing follow-up. Specific findings for volunteer coordinators: which retention signals predict drop-off, which recognition patterns land for which styles, what the data says about pairing volunteers across styles. Less academic, more operational.

• Q4 2027V2

  Longitudinal Cohort, Year One

  Test-retest reliability, observed drift in primary style over twelve months, whether self-recognition holds up over time. The first quantitative answer to the question: does someone's volunteer style change, and if so, when?

What every respondent contributes.

Per completed quiz, the research dataset records: the respondent’s primary and secondary styles, raw scores for all six styles, the Bridging Index value, the (hidden) Service Orientation Score, the (hidden) Identity Score, and (when the respondent opts in) anonymous demographics: age range, tenure, organizational type, geographic region, role description, and an optional 280-character open-text reflection.

What the dataset does not contain. No names, no email addresses, no IP addresses, no fingerprintable client metadata, no cookies, no third-party identifiers. Hashed pseudonyms are used internally for duplicate-session detection only and are never published. The full data- handling posture is described in our privacy notice.

Free, full, and forever.

Both the published reports and the underlying aggregate dataset will be released under a permissive open license. Researchers can cite, reproduce, and extend the analyses. Practitioners can derive their own insights. Journalists can fact-check. We commit to publishing the methodology, the scoring code, the question bank, and the aggregate frequency tables in full, not just a curated narrative.

What we will not release. Individual-level rows. Even though the dataset is anonymous, releasing per-respondent data risks re-identification when joined with external sources. Aggregate cohorts with a minimum cell size of 50 are the smallest unit we will publish.

How to reference the project.

Until the first formal output is published, the canonical citation for the framework is the methodology page:

Better Impact. (2026). MyImpactStyle: A volunteer-native framework for service motivation. Retrieved from https://myimpactstyle.com/methodology.

Help build it.

Five to six minutes. Anonymous. No email. Your answers quietly contribute to the ten-thousand-respondent dataset behind the upcoming report.