VSO is a non-governmental international development
organization that works by (mainly) linking volunteers
with partner organizations in developing countries. Each
year approximately 1500 volunteers are recruited and take
up placements in one of the over forty developing countries
in which VSO operates. Our interest in VSO was
sparked due to an initiative to develop a new performance
measurement system, subsequently referred to as the
‘Quality Framework’ (QF). This framework attempted to
combine different metrics and narrative content into a single
report that would provide a common measure of performance
in each of VSO’s country programmes.