Substance provided the first major research into RNLI’s Operational Volunteers. This included: consultation with individual stations and volunteers; data manipulation and analysis of historic, organisation-wide data relating to crew availability, effort, diversity, recruitment and retention; station community mapping; creation of station level reporting system creating measures, baselines, RAG rating and auto-generated PDF reports for 236 stations; research into Future Trends in volunteering including case study work and consultation with stations and volunteers, sector literature and data reviews, population studies and forecasts. Reporting included:

• Cleaned, merged databases with formulas and summary statistics.
• Organisational Level report on Trends in Volunteering, with summary measures, visuals, commentary and headline statistics, supplemented by a full Technical Annex to enable replication in future.
• Stylised, graphic, HTML-based Station Level Reports allowing production of 238 individual station reports, each with common structure, baselines and RAG rating assessing the health of the station’s volunteer force.
• A Future Trends Report with national literature and statistical review and case studies to highlight future issues in volunteering, produced in Executive Summary, Overview and Full Report formats along with presentations and Appendices.