"More and more people and organisations are becoming aware of the educational value of volunteering, and of validation opportunities for the voluntary sector. However, ther use and impact is largely unknown. Furthermore the risk of reinventing the wheel by setting up new projects is evident, and on the other hand, there are ‘’missing links’’e.g. in connecting the validation methods with the European Guidelines or instruments like the European Qualification Framework for Validation or in forms of volunteering that are not recognised. The Improving Validation in the Voluntary Sector (ImproVal) project was set out to tackle this problem. The group of five European organisations put together their past and present expertise on skills recognition and validation in the voluntary sector. By bringing together existing information and collecting new data, ImproVal project created an online compendium, a synthesis, a study and policy recommendations for advancing the understanding on validating volunteers' skills.We engaged over 80 representatives from voluntary organisations, volunteers and validation experts in our study on experiences in using tools designed for validating volunteers' skills. Through the webinars and workshops we reached about 100 stakeholders live at local, national and European level, and webinar recordings and videos reached 270 views. Over the 26 months of ImproVal project, we- created a ""volunteering validation compendium"", an online collection of 45 validation tools in 22 languages from EU member states- created a synthesis of the validation tools (46 tools) by analysing their pedagogical principles and other essential dimensions- conducted a study among volunteers and organisations who have participated in validation processes about the impact of validation, combining quantitative data by questionnaires and qualitative data through group interviews- produced an article based on the study and translated the summary to five languages (DE, FI, FR, NL, SK)- produced recommendations for policy makers and organisations interested in validation on basis of the synthesis and study- composed an annex to the policy recommendations, which connects numbers of executed validation projects in different EU member states to national policies of validation and volunteering- engaged stakeholders in a dialogue on validation by using webinars and facilitated workshops, thus raising their awareness and interest in advancing validation. As a result:- Participating organisations have learned to adapt their validation policies and gained new methods as well as reached an overview about existing instruments to validate skills and competencies acquired in field of volunteering- There is an increased understanding of the value of competencies gained by volunteering and volunteering in general among participating organisations and various stakeholders, such as voluntary organisations, educational institutions and policy makers- Various organisations have been informed about the project outcomes, and in the future they will be able to use and adapt existing tools in their validation activities and avoid putting time and effort into creating something that already exists and to focus on more innovative projects- Policy developments can be detected at micro level at some educational institutions in them opening up more to validating informally learning outcomes, and beyond individual institutions in policy recommendations at local, regional and even national and European levels. In the long term, the project benefits a wide number of individual volunteers who will have better access to validation opportunities, thus increasing motivation for learning and employability, and also voluntary organisations through access to methods and tools, educational institutions through an understanding on learning by volunteering and validation which give them the ability to guide their learners more smoothly though formal education, and employers and policy makers by increasing their awareness of the educational value of volunteering and their ability to design policies that advance the use of validation."