Research on Volunteering

In the last quarter century, nonprofits have increasingly been held accountable for the resources that have been entrusted to them. For some organizations, accountability mechanisms have been imposed left, right, and center, as funders and donors seek to monitor the use of the funds they provide. While a reasonable amount of accountability is beneficial all around, too much emphasis on this measure can be stifling and may indeed have exactly the opposite effect of what it intended to promote: efficient and effective use of resources.

While we generally can find information on the financial resources used by nonprofits, public disclosure of the amount and significance of volunteer contributions to those organizations is far less common. In this Research to Practice, Laurie Mook presents the findings of researchers in Australia who set out to determine just how organizations account for volunteer services. The study involved over 400 nonprofit organizations. The researchers systematically reviewed these organizations’ websites and annual reports for any disclosure of volunteer contributions, including their acknowledgement; how they supported mission and the wider community; human resources measures such as the number of volunteers and hours contributed; and policies guiding their involvement.

How well did the organizations do in discharging their accountability for their reliance on and use of volunteer contributions? Too much, too little or just right? As Mook reveals, the results are enlightening.

In 2009, Jeffrey L. Brudney and Lucas C.P.M. Meijs proposed a new way of thinking about volunteer resources: as a natural resource which must be managed sustainably or it will be exhausted. In their article, "It Ain’t Natural: Toward a New (Natural) Resource Conceptualization for Volunteer Management" (published in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Volume 38, Issue 4, and reviewed in e-Volunteerism by Steven Howlett), the authors argued that volunteer energy should be viewed as a human-made, renewable resource that people can grown, recycle and influence positively as well as negatively.

Do you have a fresh concept for building your volunteer program, and you wonder if anyone has ever tried it before? Or perhaps you need someone with formal skills in scientific methods to help you design a plan for implementation? When you need answers to both of these issues, you can turn to academic research and research practitioners. Exploration of research literature can result in ideas and evidence to support best practices in volunteer engagement, and results can be multiplied through collaborative partnerships with faculty and student scholars.

In this article, Janina M. Fuller presents a practical approach to mining scholarly literature and to finding colleagues in academia to create partnerships that will expand your research horizons even further. Seeking research-based articles that offer fresh insights into the everyday concerns of volunteer management professionals? Writing a grant proposal to fund a new programming initiative? Whatever your goal, this article will provide new access to the vast and largely untapped resource of scholarly literature, and to the people who create it.

After more than a decade in the classroom, Sarah Jane Rehnborg has taught volunteer management on the graduate level to students from public affairs, business management, social work, communications, fine arts and other areas of specialization. Along the way, Rehnborg discovered some interesting resources and methods to convey some of the key concepts in volunteer management — teaching tools that are equally applicable to students and any audience that needs to be educated about our field.

In Part 1 of this article presented in our last issue, Rehnborg explored a technique for developing role-play scenarios and the use of current events in the classroom.   Now, in Part 2, Rehnborg discusses ways to explore critical thinking skills, the value of guest speakers and the complexity of internship experiences. Just as she did in Part 1, Rehnborg shares useful resources that will help inform your own knowledge of the field, while helping you develop presentations that capture critical volunteer management issues for paid colleagues and volunteers as they learn the ropes of working with the community. 

During the 1960s, interest surged across the United States for the engagement of community volunteers on behalf of juvenile and adult offenders in the courts and corrections systems. What was then the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare funded a range of initiatives and studies to support this movement. This Voices from the Past article quotes from various official reports that detail the results of this volunteer involvement and recommend future actions. Many of the points raised in the 1960s remain relevant and e-Volunteerism wants to help them stay in circulation. Granted, much has changed involving this topic over the past 50 years, but other things have very much stayed the same. 

Sarah Jane Rehnborg has more than a decade in the classroom – teaching volunteer management on the graduate level to students from public affairs, business management, social work, communications, fine arts and other areas of specialization. Along the way, Rehnborg found some interesting resources and methods to convey some of the key concepts in volunteer management. Since her students are frequently new to studying volunteer issues, these teaching tools are equally applicable to any audience that needs to be educated about our field.

In Part 1 of this article presented here, Rehnborg explores a teachnique for developing role-play scenarios and the use of current events in the classroom. In Part 2, presented in the next issue of e-Volunteerism, Rehnborg features ways to explore critical thinking skills, the value of guest speakers and the complexity of internship experiences. In both, Rehnborg shares useful resources that will inform your own knowledge of the field, while helping you develop presentations that capture critical volunteer managemnt issues for paid colleagues and volunteers as they learn the ropes of working with the community.

We hear over and over again how volunteers are indispensable to many organizations. While we have previously covered articles on different methods used to estimate a value for volunteer contributions, a new study out of New Zealand looks at how volunteer value is communicated, both internally and externally. In this issue, reviewer Laurie Mook examines how a team of researchers conducted a qualitative study of local and national medium-sized health charities, and provides some thought-provoking insights into the barriers and drivers to communicating volunteer value for these organizations. An interesting aspect of the study, Mook explains, is that the researchers interviewed the executive director, fundraising manager and manager of volunteers from each organization, providing for a more holistic look at how volunteer value is communicated. Mook also provides her insights into the practical implications of the study, encouraging readers to reflect on the implications of making volunteer contributions visible while also considering the impact of keeping them invisible.

Due to the nature of volunteering, this sector of society is not often associated with conflict. However, like the wider community, conflict within volunteer-involving organisations can be a persistent problem. Although most volunteers enjoy positive and fulfilling experiences and are generally satisfied with the volunteering process, research undertaken by Volunteering WA shows that around 10 per cent of volunteers have been involved in a conflict with an organisation where they have volunteered.

This feature article by Denise Bertilone, the Research & Project Officer at Volunteering WA, describes how conflict develops and focuses on conflict and conflict resolution within volunteer-involving organisations in Western Australia. It examines some of the sources and results, and features personalized accounts of volunteers’ experiences with conflict and its aftermath. It seeks to stimulate discussion on whether or not an independent redress mechanism is a necessity for the volunteering sector, and whether or not volunteer organizations should implement grievance policies and procedures.       

This issue’s Research to Practice provides great food for thought on organizational factors affecting volunteer management. For example, how do the goals of the organization, area of activity, or degree of bureaucracy impact the role that a volunteer management program can take in the strategic achievement of an organization’s mission? How can organizational settings be “assessed and aligned to the needs of volunteers, but also to those of the organization and society at large?”

In this article, reviewer Laurie Mook shares insights from Sibylle Studer and Georg von Schnurbein, two researchers from the Centre for Philanthropy Studies at the University of Basel in Switzerland. They reviewed and synthesized academic literature relevant to volunteer management from 1967 to 2011, looking for evidence to help explain how nonprofit organizational factors supported or restricted volunteer management. As the researchers found, there are many studies looking at ‘who volunteers’ and ‘why people volunteer,’ but studies from the organizational perspective are not as prevalent. Mook presents their findings and other conclusions about organizational factors and how they impact strategic volunteer management.

In a Research to Practice article in e-Volunteerism last year, Laurie Mook explored the Manual on the Measurement of Volunteer Work, a recent publication of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The manual was designed "to guide countries in generating systematic and comparable data on volunteer work via regular supplements to labour force or other household surveys." The European Commission and the European Volunteer Centre soon endorsed its findings.

Volunteer management representatives need to take another careful and critical look at what the ILO is really saying in the manual, which we aruge presents some faulty conclusions. Though most practitioners will not read this sort of academic tome, at least some of us must pay attention and speak out because government officials and funders will no doubt be guided by the Manual and its conclusions. In this Voices article, author Rob Jackson offers his personal opinions and encourages further exchange and perspectives from e-Volunteerism readers.