We must work to strengthen volunteer engagement across our non-profit organizations to allow them to do the most good for their members and the world.
Life Advice, Opinion
While I reference two non-profit organizations in this piece, the National Postdoctoral Association and the Graduate Career Consortium, the thoughts and opinions shared here are not necessarily meant to reflect the current and complete state of those organizations' volunteer and engagement efforts.
In a prior post I spoke to the importance in getting involved in various organizations and groups as a way to build skills, expand one's network, and give back. Volunteering around causes you care about is vital to so many areas of one's life. Sadly, however, volunteer engagement is on the decline.
In a survey of over 1,200 non-profit leaders conducted in 2022, 46.8% said that recruiting sufficient volunteers is a big problem for their organization. Those numbers have almost doubled from the 2003 survey, in which 29% of nonprofits saw this issue as a big problem. Furthermore, nearly half of non-profit leaders believe that the lack of volunteers is a "big problem" to their organizations fulfilling their missions. This same report also pointed out that the ~100 institutional funders they surveyed were less likely to endorse the belief that volunteers provide important programmatic and functional support to non-profit organizations (when compared to responses from non-profit leaders) and were less aware of some of the challenges organizations faced in recruiting volunteers. This gap in funders' understanding of volunteer engagement and impact may result in it being difficult for non-profits to solicit funding support for these efforts. Importantly, the study also found that most non-profit organizations do not ask for funding for volunteer engagement and emphasized that funders see benefits to supporting volunteer engagement if they perceive the investment increases the capacity of volunteers to form or strengthen connections with other people or organizations in the community.
Personal observations of volunteer engagement at two non-profit organizations
I have seen some of the challenges in volunteer recruitment and engagement first-hand as part of my involvement in two organizations close to my heart: the National Postdoctoral Association (NPA) and the Graduate Career Consortium (GCC). Across both organizations, interest and engagement with what one might call "service" committees has eroded, potentially because some volunteer tasks and activities in these areas seem like "work".
In addition, finding individuals interested in taking on leadership roles within each organization has been a challenge. Part of that issue could be a lack of leadership development, which, admittedly, is difficult to do in the best of situations let alone when resources are tight and bandwidth limited. But it also is the case that if your pool of volunteers from which you ideally want to draw new leaders is shallow, finding an individual who wants to take on a leadership role is more challenging.
While the NPA has a small staff (of 3.5 FTE as of this writing), many of them are focused on the day-to-day running of the organization and trying to "keep the lights on." As such, focusing on a complex problem like "volunteer engagement" and "leadership development" is a challenge. The GCC suffers from the fact that it is a 100% volunteer-run organization. So, all day-to-day operational tasks of the GCC falls to its leaders and members to execute. Having served on the Executive Committee of the GCC, I can tell you that it is A LOT of work. Furthermore, much like the NPA, GCC leadership spends much of its time trying to keep the organization running and fiscally stable.
Both the NPA and GCC are great organizations with important missions and are working diligently to try to improve and evolve their operations and structures to serve their members better. That said, they can only do so much at their current volunteer levels. Both organizations would be transformed if more members engaged in volunteer efforts and activities. This requires infrastructure and a plan to accomplish, however. And while leadership in each organization can start to shape processes and procedures to improve volunteer recruitment, engagement, and retention, it will ultimately be up to volunteer leaders across various committees and taskforces within each organization to do the work. We need to engage volunteers in volunteer engagement which highlights the weird circularity of the problem. It will take effort to get this flywheel going but perhaps combining established volunteers and leaders in each organization with newer volunteers would allow for fresh ideas and insights to emerge. There are no easy answers but we have to start somewhere.
Why is volunteer engagement a challenge?
Certainly the COVID-19 pandemic hit many hard and led to burnout and a re-setting of priorities. Ironically, non-profit, volunteer-driven organizations offer an important service to those affected by the pandemic. Feeling isolated and uncertain? Organizations that foster community, connection, and resource sharing conceptually are more important to you now. But taking advantage of organizational resources and programs is quite different from helping to run and manage them.
Perhaps part of the lower levels of engagement in volunteer work (and paid work, too) is a general issue in our limited attention and bandwidth today...stretched to its breaking point with the proliferation of content and technologies engineered to distract us. Email, notifications on applications like Slack, and the infinitely vast distractions available via the internet and streaming content services like Netflix provide a countervailing force on our attention and focus on work that is almost insurmountable. And this is work we are paid to do that gets crowded out by digital distractions. What hope do we have for engaging in work we are not paid to do (ie, volunteer work) in such an environment?
There is also the issue that engaging in volunteer or leadership capacity in a non-profit organization is WORK. It requires effort and commitment that many have too little of these days.
Similarly, developing more robust structures to engage and support volunteers within non-profits requires work on the part of an organization whose bandwidth is already stretched due to lower levels of engagement. Ironically, solving the problem often requires more engagement and volunteers. One can see how this state of affairs could lead to a sort of "doom loop" where a decrease in volunteer engagement erodes the organization's ability to "get stuff done" and provide examples of projects and activities for prospective volunteers to get excited about, ultimately leading to less new volunteer interest in the organization.
What do we know about volunteer engagement from academic studies?
There is some interesting research looking at what factors affect both volunteer retention and engagement. In the sample of 232 active volunteers working in social or environmental non-profit organizations, regression analyses found that commitment, and not engagement, predicts intention to remain with the organization, and that engagement, and not commitment, predicts psychological well-being of the volunteers. These data suggest a need for non-profits to articulate their "why" to volunteers to solidify their commitment to the organization and its mission to keep them engaged and then through their engagement, volunteers improve their sense of well-being (ie, feel "good" about their involvement).
Indeed, other studies show that the volunteers perceive that their satisfaction with life had significantly changed as a result of doing voluntary work. In addition, this study found that the link between self-determined types of motivation and eudaimonic well-being ("living a life of virtue in pursuit of human excellence") is mediated by engagement. Engagement also mediated the positive effects of motivation on satisfaction with volunteering, which in turn acted as a second-order mediator on the relationship between self-determined types of motivation and hedonic well-being ("feel good"). In other words, volunteers need to be internally motivated to contribute to an organization and then be given pathways to engage with the organization to feel fulfillment from their involvement on a variety of levels.
Qualitative analyses of interviews with experienced volunteer managers have found that key engagement strategies could include "fulfilling ulterior motives" of the volunteers. So, organizations must work to understand what is motivating their volunteers to engage and how can the organization help to fulfill this need while also involving the volunteer in activities crucial to the organization itself. Flexibility in engaging volunteers also came up in this analysis, supporting the notion that providing volunteers different mechanisms for engagement (including potentially asynchronous tasks) allows them to remain engaged on their own terms. None of these findings are that surprising but they emphasize a need for organizations to develop infrastructure to hear from their prospective volunteers and offer them a variety of options to engage with the organization. Additional studies on volunteer engagement are linked at the end of this article.
Call to action: Make time to volunteer
Reader, perhaps you can help jump-start volunteer engagement efforts in societies or organizations you care about by taking the first step of getting more involved? This could look differently for each person and organization but active engagement of some kind is critical. Perhaps you can identify a leader of a subcommittee or group within an organization and setup a meeting to learn more about their work and whether your skills and interests could contribute in some way? These conversations (and your continued involvement in an organization) ultimately help you widen and broaden your professional network and you can develop new skills in interpersonal communication, project management, and leadership by becoming involved in a project or initiative within the organization. If you are helpful and provide value, people around you will notice and could also be excellent references for jobs you may apply to in the future. In closing, volunteering is helpful for you professionally but also helps the organization accomplish its mission. It is the ultimate win-win. So, what are you waiting for?
Volunteer with the NPA and/or GCC
If you are a postdoctoral scholar or individual working to support this population, consider joining the NPA as a volunteer. There are several committees and taskforces to get involved in.
If you work in the graduate-level (graduate student or postdoc) career & professional development space, the GCC is an amazing organization that could benefit from your contributions and involvement. Learn more about GCC committees and the organization's work and consider joining as a member if you aren't one.
Additional Reading & Resources
Research on Volunteer Engagement
Get Involved!
More from the Blog
- Nonprofit Volunteer Management: Three Tips to Increase and Maintain Engagement
- Initiative for Strategic Volunteer Engagement
- Council for Certification in Volunteer Administration
- University of Maryland Do Good Institute
- Understanding and Improving Employee Engagement - Insights from Gallup
Research on Volunteer Engagement
- Volunteer engagement and organizational commitment in nonprofit organizations: What makes volunteers remain within organizations and feel happy?
- Enhancing Volunteer Engagement to Achieve Desirable Outcomes: What Can Non-profit Employers Do?
- Volunteer Engagement and Retention: Their Relationship to Community Service Self-Efficacy
- Leading Volunteer Motivation: How Leader Behaviour can Trigger and Fulfil Volunteers’ Motivations
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