Readers of e-Volunteerism and users of the Web site often want to find evidence to support the impact of volunteering. In short, does volunteering work? Finding evidence to support volunteering can be tricky, for all sorts of reasons. This edition of Research to Practice looks at some of those issues and reviews a publication that pulls together evidence that covers some key policy areas of volunteering.
When a volunteer walks through a manager’s door, each volunteer brings along a whole system of expectations, wishes and demands associated with the volunteer experience. Volunteer managers often recognize one category of expectations as the “fantasy world” of the volunteer. These expectations are frequently hidden from the volunteer manager and often only exist subconsciously for the volunteer. While the volunteer’s altruistic motives are most important in the first stages of recruiting and integrating the volunteer, the volunteer’s fantasies are most likely to surface during the actual volunteer experience. During this stage, if these additional hidden needs of the volunteer are not fulfilled, the altruistic motives that the volunteer previously declared will gradually erode, often causing the volunteer to drop out early on.
In this e-Volunteerism feature story, we review how these fantasy concepts challenge volunteer managers and discuss why it’s important to understand the nature of volunteer fantasies. Ultimately, volunteer managers who learn to manage these conditions help influence the management practices of the entire organization – for the better.
In this discussion of research from the Netherlands, Research to Practice explores how volunteers are as committed as paid workers and provides examples of how organizations can deepen the attachment of their volunteers. Editor Steven Howlett further explores how the issues discussed in this research “chime nicely with what we know, underlining other findings and suggesting that for commitment, at least, volunteers from different parts of the globe have a lot in common.”
This edition of Research to Practice looks again at research into volunteering by older people. Globally it seems we are witnessing an increased desire to get older people involved in voluntary and community organizations. This may be for a number of reasons − from recognition of the intrinsic worth of involvement in democratic societies to recognition of health benefits gained from participation and the goal of balancing work and care in aging populations. The result, however, is that older people’s involvement is a popular area for study.
Anticipating the huge number of Baby Boomers entering retirement in the next two decades, RSVP of North Central Iowa leaders decided to focus their attention on how to engage that cohort in volunteer service. Attracting even a small percentage of the area’s approximately 22,000 Baby Boomers into volunteerism could yield enormous dividends for the citizens in the region. In this feature story for e-Volunteerism, RSVP Director Elaine Hanson and consultant Elizabeth Weinstein reveal how the organization responded to the “call to action” – a move that resulted in series of activities and research projects aimed at capturing the hearts and talents of potential Baby Boomer volunteers.
Yad Sarah is an Israeli nationwide network of volunteers aiding needy, disabled and elderly people. The organization relies on volunteers and provides many essential services which are not covered by the government, such as lending medical equipment, day rehabilitation centers, transportation for the disabled and geriatric dental services. Through Yad Sarah, professional dentists in Jerusalem volunteer to serve the underprivileged elderly, an act of volunteering that expresses social solidarity and willingness to contribute.
Avraham Zini and Harold D. Sgan-Cohen, two leading dental experts in Jerusalem, decided to explore ways to improve the satisfaction among volunteer dentists – for the benefit of the health care providers and the community recipients. Towards this goal, they surveyed 67 dentists currently volunteering on a regular basis at the Yad Sarah geriatric dental clinic in Jerusalem. In this feature story, e-Volunteerism presents the results of Zini and Sgan-Cohen’s research, outlining the main reasons that lead Israeli dentists to volunteer. Their article reviews the aspects of dental volunteering efforts that fulfilled expectations, and which areas proved less than satisfactory. This important research provides a unique look inside a volunteer experience that is rarely made available to the public.
In this Keyboard Roundtable, we’re casting a wide net to explore a number of volunteerism issues from the diverse perspectives of people involved in volunteering. “From Whose Perspective?” will include a discussion of such important issues as:
We’ll engage a few corporate and community sector volunteer managers, a public sector volunteer manager and a volunteer to help us gain multiple perspectives in this next Keyboard Roundtable.
The term ‘engagement’ has gained appeal in both the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors to explain and understand relationship management with paid and voluntary staff. Yet little to no research has been done that focuses specifically on a volunteer’s engagement and how that might differ from a paid employee’s. This feature story will deconstruct the concept of engagement and suggest variables which need to be acknowledged in studying this concept and how it applies to volunteers. Looking to the future, we’ll also explore how to move forward to increase engagement capacity within the volunteer management profession.
Surveys in different countries show that people often choose to volunteer in the sport and recreation field. During 2006, Sport and Recreation New Zealand (SPARC) commissioned research to look at how to motivate and recruit more volunteers, and successive SPARC studies show how important volunteers are to sport in New Zealand. This edition of Research to Practice considers how this detailed research can be applied across all volunteer-involving organisations.
In 1971, behavioral scientists and innovative trainers Eva Schindler-Rainman and Ronald Lippett published The Volunteer Community: Creative Use of Human Resources. Though the book is now out of print, many of its concepts continue to resonate. In this Voices from the Past, e-Volunteerism is pleased to publish an excerpt of Chapter Four, in which the authors present a force field analysis of volunteer motivation. The analysis helps explain what pushes people towards a “yes” to volunteering, and what pushes them towards a “no.” The authors do the same analysis on another equally important volunteering decision: whether to continue as a volunteer, or to drop out.