Trends and Issues

The Minnesota Association for Volunteer Administration (MAVA) hosted its biennial conference on May 8 - 10 in Minneapolis. MAVA is one of the premier professional societies in North America and its conference is always excellent. Participants come from Minnesota and way beyond, especially bordering Canada.  e-Volunteerism's editorial team members Rob Jackson and Susan Ellis were presenters and exhibitors – along with several other authors of past articles in this journal. So it seemed particularly appropriate to use the opportunity to return to one of Voices’ intermittent features and interview conference goers on site. 

Volunteer-involving organizations – whether nonprofits, government agencies or all-volunteer associations – regularly search for new philosophies and technologies to maximize volunteerism and advance the organization’s purpose. However, implementing the use of personality profiles rarely makes the list of strategic initiatives. But in today’s social world, understanding an individual’s personality is critical to serving up relevant communications and interacting in meaningful ways. In order to succeed, organizations must emotionally engage their volunteers.

In this feature article, authors John Marshall and Hugh Massie take readers step by step to illustrate and explain how to use personality profiles in volunteer-involving organizations. And, the authors argue, "the investment of time and resources to incorporate personality profiles into the process of recruiting, organizing and engaging volunteers is one that pays off tenfold."

More and more, companies want to engage their communities through employee volunteering programs. For most businesses, this means calling a nonprofit and scheduling an activity. The nonprofits that can readily design and host successful employee volunteering events will find themselves critical and necessary assets in what has quickly become a key business strategy. Understanding why employee volunteering is important to companies is key to creating a good partnership. In this article, author Chris Jarvis provides some insights into what companies want from employee volunteering programs, and how nonprofits can position themselves as an indispensable corporate partner.

In this issue, author Laurie Mook looks at an interesting case study of the Philadelphia Ronald McDonald House as an example of how to measure the direct impact of volunteer service on the organization, clients and volunteers themselves. The research – conducted by Debbie Haski-Leventhal (Australia School of Business), Lesley Hustinx (Ghent University, Belgium), and Femida Handy (University of Pennsylvania) – is based on a series of surveys, informal interviews and observations through the researchers’ own involvement as volunteers in the organization.

As Mook explains, volunteer managers often view the monetary value placed upon volunteer service as one way to gauge the relative importance of volunteer resources as compared to other resources in delivering the services of a nonprofit. And, according to Mook, volunteer hours are also used as a proxy for impact.  But through this case study, Mook explores a few more tools. For example, the findings in this study reveal several areas of impact that can be measured. From the perspective of the client, three categories of impact emerge: tangible impact (providing services), attitudes (satisfaction and perceived altruism) and future behavior (willingness to volunteer). From the perspective of the volunteer, intrinsic and tangible benefits are identified. Overall, the researchers are able to communicate the distinctive and unique impact that the volunteers had for the organization. 

In this Voices, we underscore the fact that Steve McCurley has been remarkably prolific during his career. His earliest publications (1972- 2004) are listed in a 10-page, single-spaced bibliography on the Energize Web site. As the Director of Research for the National Center for Voluntary Action (the predecessor of the predecessor of the predecessor of Points of Light), he often contributed to their magazine, Voluntary Action Leadership, with his first article appearing in the Fall 1976 issue. We present an excerpt from that article in this issue of Voices, along with excerpts from a number of Steve's long out-of-print articles, including items he wrote for “Grapevine,” the bi-monthly newsletter he produced with Sue Vineyard beginning in the 1980s. You’ll be surprised at how much of Steve’s “Early McCurley” material still resonates in today’s world.

In this Research to Practice, author Laurie Mook reviews the use of social computing technologies by volunteer coordinators at nonprofit organizations. Mook looks at research on use and non-use of technology, based on interviews with 23 volunteer coordinators from three different metropolitan areas of the western United States. The study was conducted by Amy Voida, Ellie Harmon and Ban Al-Ani of the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.

As background, the researchers take the perspective that the work of volunteer coordinators is bridge-building work—bringing together numerous public constituencies as well as constituencies within their organizations. And one might expect that this class of work would be well supported by social software, some of which has been found to enable bridging social capital. However, the researchers find that, in many ways, this class of technology fails to adequately support volunteer coordinators’ bridge-building work.  The study then offers a number of strategies for bridge-building via social computing technologies, reviews the numerous challenges faced by volunteer coordinators in their use of these technologies, and presents opportunities for designing social software to better support bridge-building between organizations and the public.