Search results

Volunteers are often crucial components to many nonprofit organizations as their financial resources continue to decline. Volunteer activities in the nonprofit sector provide a broad range of services from administrative support (24%) such as fundraising and office work to providing social service and care (20%) such as preparing and delivering food, teaching or counseling. The purpose of this study was to examine the influences of important factors in creating volunteers’ engagement with nonprofit organizations.

The population of the proposed survey was volunteers of a faith-based nonprofit organization in the Northeast region of United States. The organization is a synod that oversees more than 1,000 Presbyterian churches over eight states in the Northeast region of the United States. The primary focus of its mission is prison ministry that aims to help imprisoned immigrants and their families with legal and other necessary supports. With help from the organization’s management, the researcher sent out an online survey to 1,973 eligible volunteers, with response rate of 29.90 percent (AAPOR RR1). This resulted in a total sample size of 590 volunteers who completed the survey.

This study found that, when the level of identification was higher, the influence of satisfaction on affective commitment became greater. Therefore, for this nonprofit organization that heavily relies on volunteer support, it is important to establish and maintain a mutually agreeable identification with its volunteers to foster volunteer engagement. Volunteer-organization identification seemed particularly crucial for volunteers to be empowered and to become actively involved with the case organization. Also, when individual volunteers identified themselves with the nonprofit organization, there was a greater influence of satisfaction with the organization on their engagement in their voluntary work.

This study findings suggest that for a nonprofit organization that heavily relies on volunteer support, it is important to establish and maintain a mutually agreeable identification with its volunteers to foster volunteer engagement. Volunteer-organization identification seemed particularly crucial for volunteers to be empowered and to become actively involved with the case organization. Due to the exploratory nature of the study with the survey data from a single nonprofit organization, the application of the research findings beyond the scope of this study should be made cautiously. Especially, given various kinds of nonprofit organizations, the specific context of this study’s nonprofit organization (i.e., faith-based charity organization) would limit the general application of research findings.

This study also suggests a sound measure of volunteer engagement. For management of volunteer engagement, the suggested measurement system can be helpful for management of nonprofit organizations and further research in nonprofit public relations.

Extra-role behaviors and organizational citizenship behaviors have been identified as manifest characteristics of both employee and customer engagement and this link has yet to be explored in the nonprofit sector for volunteering and cause advocating behaviors. The current study adopts engagement as an important motivational variable to understand volunteer motivations and suggests satisfaction with nonprofit organization management and volunteer-organization identification as important antecedents to volunteer engagement.

This paper addresses the issue of knowledge creation in organizational environment by exploring the kind of knowledge that is created through corporate volunteering and how these knowledge creation processes could be strategically managed to add value to overall corporate knowledge-creation process.

The paper reports a qualitative case study of a single corporate volunteering project in The Netherlands.

Corporate volunteering mainly contributes to intrinsic knowledge creation. This process could be influenced by addressing design-related aspects of corporate volunteering, such as time frame and space, skill-oriented design, interdepartmental design, informal atmosphere and perceived support.

The paper explores corporate volunteering from the perspective of knowledge being created in this process.

This paper aims to introduce the theme issue question “why and how should the international volunteer tourism experience be improved?”.

An Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded Festival of Social Science event entitled “Pursuing Quality in International Volunteering” was held at the University of Brighton in November 2013. This event brought together academics and practitioners in a successful debate, but it was also recognised that this was the first step on a long journey. The articles in this theme issue are drawn both from attendees at the ESRC event and from the wider international volunteer tourism network of academics and practitioners.

This paper introduces the key stakeholders of international volunteer tourism and the extent to which their voices are prominent (or not) in respect of the issues of achieving quality. Further, the paper highlights a number of quality mechanisms that are offered as solutions to the challenges that currently beleaguer international volunteer tourism.

Whilst not all the key stakeholder voices are represented in this theme issue, the discussions and implications that are drawn out are of importance to all stakeholder groups.

This is the first time a journal issue has focused on the challenges of achieving quality in respect of international volunteer tourism.

This article describes how professionals leading volunteers can purposefully work toward developing the “leadership identity” of individual volunteers. These concepts and the application of them are presented in the context of Cooperative Extension volunteer groups. Specific methods of developing the leadership identity and capacity of individual volunteers and for developing shared leadership within volunteer groups are offered. This article contains many implications and applications for all types of volunteers, including those outside an Extension context.

Examines the demographic make‐up of volunteers and their motives for participating in a mega‐event. Compares the Olympic Winter Games held in Lillehammer, Norway in 1994 and the Olympic Summer Games held in Sydney, Australia in 2000. Finds that volunteers in these events had similar demographic characteristics to more conventional volunteers and similar conventional motives. Also finds that volunteers in these events are strongly motivated by pride in their country and its culture, social contact and friendship. Concludes that there are important implications for organizations to glean from these findings in the area of human resource development.

The purpose of this paper is to implement an activity support system for volunteer fire corps using Web-GIS technology.

In this study, the authors implemented a volunteer fire corps activity support system comprising a dispatch request system, a water sources geographic information system, a fire-vehicle location confirmation system, a route history system and an integrated management system. They implemented this system as a Web application in consideration of responsive design assuming that it is used on mobile terminals.

To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed system, the authors conducted a survey of 18 fire corps volunteers who were asked to evaluate the system for operability, relevance, functionality, usability and effectiveness.

In this research work, the authors implemented the volunteer fire corps activity support system using Web-GIS technology. The authors conducted a questionnaire survey of the volunteer fire corps activity support system, asking 18 fire corps volunteers to evaluate the system for operability, relevance, functionality, usability and effectiveness. The results of the survey indicate an overwhelming positive response to the volunteer fire corps activity support system for all five measures.

Sherry Clark, Development Officer, Mental Health at the National Centre for Volunteering, reports the findings from her recent survey amongst people with mental health issues who had taken up voluntary work. The survey found that 66% of the 120 respondents volunteered on a weekly basis, nearly 75% said that the organisation where they volunteered offered valuable support and 81% felt that volunteering had made a positive impact on their mental health.

The aim of this paper is twofold: to delineate the results of the focus groups regarding volunteers and their needs; and to compare the results with pertinent literature regarding volunteerism to determine whether the motivating factors and needs of volunteers still need to be addressed by public health and other professional practitioners.

Focus groups were conducted with public health volunteers and content analysis was conducted to identity central themes.

Several important themes related to motivation and training emerged from the focus groups. These findings are supported by the sociological, psychological, management and administrative literature on volunteerism.

While qualitative, these findings emphasize factors of which public health and emergency management officials need to be cognizant as they prepare, plan and work with volunteers.

In order to retain volunteers' public health and emergency management, volunteer programs need to address the social, interpersonal, and educational desires of volunteers.

The perceptions, values, interests and motivation of public health volunteers were directly elicited in order to identify factors that facilitate volunteer participation in public health and emergency responses.

This study aims to critically examine the effects of COVID-19 social discourses and policy decisions specifically on older adult volunteers in the UK, comparing the responses and their effects in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, providing perspectives on effects of policy changes designed to reduce risk of infection as a result of COVID-19, specifically on volunteer involvement of and for older adults, and understand, from the perspectives of volunteer managers, how COVID-19 restrictions had impacted older people’s volunteering and situating this within statutory public health policies.

The study uses a critical discourse approach to explore, compare and contrast accounts of volunteering of and for older people in policy, and then compare the discourses within policy documents with the discourses in personal accounts of volunteering in health and social care settings in the four nations of the UK. This paper is co-produced in collaboration with co-authors who have direct experience with volunteer involvement responses and their impact on older people.

The prevailing overall policy approach during the pandemic was that risk of morbidity and mortality to older people was too high to permit them to participate in volunteering activities. Disenfranchising of older people, as exemplified in volunteer involvement, was remarkably uniform across the four nations of the UK. However, the authors find that despite, rather than because of policy changes, older volunteers, as part of, or with the help of, volunteer involving organisations, are taking time to think and to reconsider their involvement and are renewing their volunteer involvement with associated health benefits.

Working with participants as co-authors helps to ensure the credibility of results in that there was agreement in the themes identified and the conclusions. A limitation of this study lies in the sampling method, as a convenience sample was used and there is only representation from one organisation in each of the four nations.

The paper combines existing knowledge about volunteer involvement of and for older adults.

Discusses the necessary tools for effectively managing unpaid volunteers, with a focus on motivation. Emphasizes there are three volunteer types: spot volunteer, casual and targeting specific needs; second comes the more formal type of volunteer service; and third, the “pressured” volunteer from an employer or other area. Gives and in‐depth view of volunteerism and how they should be managed, efficiently and also with appreciation, by organizations that need to get the best from volunteers.