Research on Volunteering

What does it mean to move beyond volunteers as a “program” and, instead, embrace engagement as a strategy to fulfill your mission? The shift starts by understanding the benefits of developing a strategic plan for volunteer engagement. In this article, writer Beth Steinhorn highlights some of the research behind volunteer engagement strategies and shares a step-by-step process for developing a volunteer engagement strategic plan. She traces how one regional humane society developed such a plan and, as a result, is now lightening its staff’s heavy workload, bringing more skills into the organization, gaining more advocates, increasing resources, and ultimately helping more animals. 

 

Volunteer stress is an important topic. While there are a good number of studies looking at this in terms of implications for the volunteer’s health and well-being, this quarter’s Research to Practice reviews exploratory research that analyzes the issue from an organizational perspective. Gathered from a sample of attendees at the Australian National Volunteering Conference in 2013, the data provides insights into sources and causes of volunteer stress, organizational responses, and desired organizational support.

And there’s good news: according to this exploratory study, a “wide range of volunteer stressors” appear to be “firmly within the purview of organizations to manage and ameliorate.”

In this Research to Practice, Laurie Mook reviews a study examining factors that influence volunteer satisfaction and volunteer contributions, defined as a combination of the number of programs involved in and the number of hours served. Specifically, the study looked at leadership style and volunteer motivations. Mook explains that motives that predicted volunteer satisfaction were different from those that predicted contributions, and that transformational leadership impacted satisfaction but not contributions. In other words, the most satisfied volunteers are not necessarily the ones making the most contributions to an organization’s mission.

Mook also reviews the implications of these findings for organizational administrators who are looking to increase the contributions of their volunteers.  

 

In this quarter’s Research to Practice, Laurie Mook reviews a study by Mark A. Hager and Jeffrey L. Brudney testing whether or not the “adoption of ‘best practices’ (such as interviewing volunteers, matching them to assignments, supervising volunteer activities, and recognizing their contributions to organizations) are associated with program outcomes of recruitment ease, retention of volunteers, and the net benefits that volunteers bring to organizational operations” (2015, 235). The data arise from telephone interviews with volunteer administrators or executive directors in a nationally representative survey of 1,361 organizations in the U.S. Their findings may cause you to rethink (or reinforce!) your approach to volunteer management.

This quarter’s Research to Practice reviews an article that presents a way to measure the social returns on investment in volunteer recruiting, training, and management. Called Social Return on Investment, or SROI, it is a type of cost-benefit analysis that compares the present value of social outcomes created by the organization to the value of monetary and in-kind resources (including volunteer contributions) required to generate those outcomes.

As reviewer Laurie Mook explains, funders and government agencies have expressed great interest in the idea of calculating SROIs for organizations. Mook looks specifically at a case study by Italian researchers who apply this process to the volunteer program of a summer camp that offers recreational therapy for children with serious illnesses. The researchers end up with a SROI calculated as a ratio between the total present value of impacts on volunteers as well as on services, and the total costs of inputs required to recruit, train, and manage volunteers. Mook also examines the methodology as a potential tool to focus attention on the socio-economic impact created by organizations, for volunteers themselves, and for society-at-large. 

Understanding the health benefits of volunteering for older adults can provide multiple opportunities for increasing the impact of nonprofit organizations, and the quality of life generally in our communities. From a volunteer management perspective, this has implications for recruitment, retention, and reporting.

In this Research to Practice, reviewer Laurie Mook looks at an analysis of 73 peer-reviewed articles on the benefits associated with volunteering among the growing demographic of older adults. The goal of the meta-analysis was to acquire a comprehensive view of how formal volunteering might protect against cognitive decline and dementia. Although many activities provide social, physical, and cognitive opportunities for older adults that have been shown to result in health-related benefits, volunteerism has an added dimension: altruism. Here we explore how strategic volunteer management can add to making a difference.

Organizations use many different approaches to attract and retain volunteers. For instance, one attempt at a macro level is required high school service, which aims in part to inspire large numbers of students to continue with volunteering into their adult lives by having them engage in volunteering during high school. 

This Research to Practice looks at another approach: conducting a reflective activity after volunteering to promote an intrinsic desire to volunteer. It is based on a novel field experiment study conducted in a controlled setting in order to provide clear evidence for the causal impact of reflective activity. The study found that those who had an incentive to complete a task (writing about the benefits of volunteering) that complemented their volunteer activity became more interested in volunteering going forward than those who volunteered but did not participate in the reflective activity. The study provides food for thought regarding the use of this mechanism, not only for retaining volunteers but also for providing important data to document the impact of the organization.

Cees M. van den Bos, a pioneer in the volunteering field in the Netherlands, recently discovered that there was very little academic research on the subject of volunteering infrastructure. So he set out to investigate the establishment, development, and functioning of local volunteering infrastructure since the 1970s in these eight countries: Denmark, England, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United States.

In this special e-Volunteerism issue devoted to Volunteer Centers, van den Bos presents his research and findings on volunteering infrastructure, and shares his conclusion that Volunteer Centers should be defined as “agencies that have the mission to support volunteers, volunteer-involving organizations, and volunteering in general.” He specifically notes that Volunteer Centers are characterized by six functions: brokerage, the marketing of volunteering, the development of good practices, the development of volunteering opportunities, and the strategic development of volunteering.

Through his important research, van den Bos provides insights and findings that he argues are “relevant for makers of volunteering policies, for people working within the volunteering infrastructure, and for countries that aspire to establish a volunteering infrastructure.” And, he concludes, the “legitimacy of volunteering infrastructure cannot be considered outside the context of the increasing political recognition of civil society and civic engagement. Political interests in the concepts of civil society and civic engagement in the eight cases investigated has caused volunteering to be rediscovered and re-evaluated.”