We believe in volunteers evaluating their experience here to give us valuable feedback, to enable us to work with our project partners and accommodation providers to improve things for future volunteers. This includes both informal feedback throughout their stay, so we can try to address any issues as they happen, and more formal feedback towards the end of their stay to enable us to improve things for future volunteers.
We ask every volunteer to spend a little time completing two evaluation forms just before leaving; one for their project and OCN and the other for their accommodation. These include quantified scores from 1=poor to 5=excellent to enable us to track average satisfaction rates for various factors (such as information before arrival) and for each project and qualitative feedback on their likes and dislikes and suggestions for improvement for us to regularly review as a management team
The overall satisfaction level of our volunteers’ experience is averaging over 4 (very good) but we're not complacent and keep reviewing for further improvements. For example we've just expanded and updated our Project descriptions as the scores on this were below 4 (very good). We also give feedback to the Project managers based on these evaluations, to help them improve things and if things are still not working out we may even discontinue our involvement with a Project (as we have had to do with three projects over the last couple of years – better to stick with the many good projects we have than continue to try to make into good projects some that simply aren’t working out).
We do value and use volunteer feedback and through this try to keep standards high and improve them further – so don’t be surprised at the end of your stay that we could be hassling you to make sure you do complete and return your evaluation forms.