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This paper aims to explore how volunteers choose one nonprofit organisation (NPO) rather than another. It identifies the drivers of choice, and the relationship between them, to enable NPOs to strengthen their volunteer recruitment.

A total of 51 service-delivery volunteers were interviewed, drawn from 5 leading NPOs. A laddering technique was used to understand the context in which the choice of organisation was made and the underlying personal needs and goals. The data was analysed using means-end chain (MEC) methodology to uncover the relationships between, and hierarchy of, the decision drivers.

Brand, cause, and role were found to be important in meeting personal needs and goals through volunteering. The paper makes three contributions. Firstly, it presents a clearer understanding of NPO choice through adopting an integrated theoretical perspective. Secondly, it identifies the decision-making process and key relationships between the attributes of the NPO, the consequences for the volunteer, and the connection to their personal needs. Finally, the study makes an important contribution to literature through presenting a new conceptual framework of volunteer decision-making in the nonprofit context to act as a catalyst for future research.

This research is both impactful through, and limited by, its context selection: regular service-delivery volunteers from five NPOs within two causes. The paper presents a rich research stream to extend this understanding to other nonprofit stakeholders, other causes including medical volunteer, and smaller NPOs.

In an increasingly competitive nonprofit environment with a growing need to support the vulnerable in society, NPO sustainability is dependent on their ability to recruit new volunteers. NPOs compete not only with other organisations with similar causes but also those offering similar volunteering roles, and other uses of time to meet personal needs such as sport, career, or community. Understanding how volunteers make their choice of NPO rather than other uses of their time is of vital importance to make the most effective use of scarce marketing resources. This paper contributes to that practitioner understanding.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to extend the understanding of generic motivations of volunteers to consider specific choice of NPO. Unlike previous literature, the authors bring together theory on brand, cause, and role with personal needs. The authors are also the first to apply MEC methodology to the nonprofit context to uncover the personal underlying, less salient reasons behind NPO choice and the relationship between them.

A significant management issue for nonprofit organisations (NPOs) is the disconnect between services beneficiaries and the funders of those services. Individual donors and fundraisers provide the resources to enable other people (or animals) to be supported. The purpose of this paper is to address this service management challenge through new types of customer service interactions that bring together service donors and service recipients through innovative digital communication.

Based on a review, and illustrated by recent examples of innovative best practice, the authors develop a new conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between customer participation and service brand communication.

The paper starts by identifying the problem of “nonprofit service disintermediation”. The paper also outlines the inadequacies of popular frameworks of communication, widely taught in business schools, to understand the new reality of customer-service organisation engagement in the digital age. Through adopting a customer engagement lens, the paper develops a new conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between customer participation and service brand communication.

Given the authors’ focus on the intersection between new communication opportunities and customer service interactions, this paper adds novel insight to theory and raises important implications for management.

The paper explores how, through these new communication interactions, engagement with, and loyalty to, the brand is built over time in a fluid and dynamic way. It identifies a disintermediated relationship, distinct to other service contexts, but significant in terms of value and social impact.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue of Reference Services Review entitled “LOEX‐of‐the‐West 2012: creative landscapes in southern California”.

Over 160 librarians from across the USA and Canada attended the biennial LOEX‐of‐the‐West (LOTW) conference on the campus of Woodbury University in Burbank, California from June 6‐8, 2012. LOTW strives for an atmosphere in which speakers can share innovative ideas and open a dialog with other librarians.

Traditionally, after each LOEX‐of‐the‐West (LOTW) conference a number of papers based on session presentations are submitted to Reference Services Review (RSR) for publication. Building on their work at the 2012 preconference, Editors of RSR, Ms Eleanor Mitchell and Ms Sarah Barbara Watstein, have worked closely with presenters to transform their talks to published papers. After going through a double blind peer review process, seven papers have been selected for publication in this issue.

The authors/Guest Editors are excited to share these papers in this special LOEX‐of‐the‐West issue of Reference Services Review. It is indeed just as the conference theme stated “Information Literacy for all Terrains”.