A five-year Impact Report from the School of Continuous Improvement traces how a community's contribution-scoring instrument turned volunteering into a citable record, and finds a testimonial written for one recognition round is disproportionately likely to be the one copied into the next.
A five-year Impact Report from the School of Continuous Improvement finds a volunteer's first written testimonial predicts, more than anything else, whether a second one ever gets written
The School of Continuous Improvement has spent five years chasing a specific gap in how community organisations keep faith with their own volunteers: the same generous account, once it is written down for one recognition round, tends to be the account that gets written down again. The University’s Impact Report 2021–2026, published today, gathers the School’s work on contribution scoring, testimonial reuse and recognition decisions into a single account of how a community’s memory of what it was given comes to run on a much smaller cast than the giving itself did.
The report draws on the School’s Impact Pathway Atlas program, which tracked testimonial reuse across ninety-two partner clubs, halls and associations over the period, and its parallel work auditing whether a contribution score actually decides who a nomination committee recognises, or simply gives the room something to point to afterwards.
A testimonial that gets reused is not evidence the contribution was greater. It is evidence the sentence was already written.
— Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor, Impact Pathway Atlas
Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, welcomed the report’s approach: “We’ve spent years building instruments that catch a number drifting from the thing it measures. It was only a matter of time before we turned one on the University’s own habit of deciding, out loud, who did enough.”
The full Impact Report is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.y52lql.