I gave a short talk this week at the Expert Volunteer Summit organised by the Career Development Group (CDG). It got me thinking about some of the analysis we need to do, prior to involving volunteers in the delivery of an already existing service- particularly if those services are online.
The experience that’s helped to shape my thinking on this, is setting up the peer advisor programme where we trained young people to help respond to relationships questions on YouthNet‘s online support service askTheSite. Over more than five years, we’ve trained almost 400 people to get involved and help us deliver the askTheSite service.
It’s important to be clear that by involving volunteers, the volunteers’ needs have to be considered in their own right. The delivery of the programme can not simply put the needs of the volunteers to one side, and focus on the needs of their beneficiaries.
The reason for making this separation between the needs of the volunteers and the beneficiaries of the service comes down to the importance of understanding motivation – both as a volunteer manager and as a service deliverer.
We must be clear about the motivation of the service deliverer (usually the organisation) to meet the needs of the beneficiaries. To do this, we must understand the needs of the beneficiaries.
But we must be equally clear about the complex intrinsic personal motivations of the volunteers to get involved and help provide the service. To do this, we must understand the needs of the volunteers.
Ends and Means
Often the involvement of volunteers in delivering services is viewed in fairly mechanistic terms: viewing volunteers simply as a means to an end. However, volunteering is also an end in itself (over and above the products and services it delivers). A programme that views volunteers simply as a means to an end, is very probably not realising the full potential that volunteers can bring to their service delivery programme.
Volunteers may be a means to amazing ends, but their true value goes beyond the help they deliver to the service’s users. The value of volunteering includes all the impacts the volunteering has on the volunteers themselves, the organisation they’re a part of and the wider community (see IVR’s impact assessment toolkit for example).
Given this multiplicity of impacts of volunteering means one of the key challenges of volunteer management in service delivery is balancing the needs of volunteers and the needs of beneficiaries.
Volunteering begins with a clear call to action
To engage volunteers, a clear call to action is vital. Whether this call involves a single task or a fully fledged role, there needs to be a clarity of purpose on the part of the volunteer involver. In other words, the reasons or motivations for involving volunteers in service delivery need to be clear and palpable.
If the volunteer managers are clear what this fundamental reason is: the easier it is to communicate to the volunteers what they need to do, and how it meets the needs of the beneficiaries.
The web has tended to offer that clarity by reducing volunteering to its constituent tasks. For example, participation on Wikipedia can be as a fully fledged Wikipedian curating content or as a one-off editor. The striking thing about Wikipedia’s clarity is that it can measure involvement in terms of the usefulness of the respective task to beneficiaries (such as correcting a typo or adding a sentence to an already existing article) way before you ever reach Wikipedian status.
Web-based calls to action often, initially, play down the need for commitment, and play up the belief in the network effect. As a result of the power of networks, you can believe in the meaningfulness of your individual act of kindness online, even without much evidence of it’s impact. As an online volunteer, you’re often a step back from the beneficiaries of the service or product you’re helping to provide.
For example, peer advisors on askTheSite only have contact with the service’s beneficiaries at a distance, simply because of the anonymity the service very deliberately offers to its users. An advisor won’t have any contact with the user, other than through the question the user asks. And almost certainly, will never get any direct feedback from the user about what they thought of the question, due to this level of confidentiality afforded to users.
The smaller the task offered up as the call to action, such as with online crowdsourcing or microvolunteering, the more we begin to rely on this “means to an end” logic about the value of volunteering. The more menial or repetitive the task, the harder it becomes for a volunteer to see the opportunity as a form of personal development that satisfies their inner human needs.
The value of these smaller tasks carried out online by separate individuals distributed across a network, becomes tied to how it provides a socially beneficial service or product that responds to the needs of others. The needs of the volunteers that this kind of volunteering can meet over the longer term are severely reduced.
Volunteers don’t need to have direct access to the evidence of how their volunteering helps the identified beneficiaries (although this never hurts). But they do need a narrative upon which they can hang their own personal motivations for volunteering.
Realising the clear purpose
A clear purpose for volunteering (particularly online) is reinforced by:
- Straightforward pathways into the volunteering opportunity, from the entry points such as recruitment (web can simplify these pathways) through to the training for each volunteer as they learn the ropes of service delivery (elearning is transforming training possibilities for online volunteers)
- Structured flexibility – there has to be enough flexibility to the role so that each volunteer can make the opportunity their own, but enough structure so that the volunteers’ contributions are in sync with each other (web can make volunteering more flexible: when and where it takes place) – an example is flexible shifts and places of work
- Abundant support – volunteers need support is they are to deliver a service sustainably whether that’s from their peers, skilled mentors, auxiliary services (such as administration) or getting feedback from service users (web can help provide support networks for volunteers)
However, a clear purpose for involving volunteers and understanding the organisation’s motivation for involving volunteers counts for nothing, if organisations ignore what motivates the volunteers to get involved in the first place.
Understanding motivation to volunteer
There’s a huge wealth of research into why volunteers volunteer. I’ve gone into some of this research in a previous post. Many topline findings point to the fact that volunteers are often primarily motivated by the idea of helping others. This makes intuitive sense. However, to assume that volunteers get involved in service delivery only because they want to help the beneficiaries, is simplistic in the extreme. Below this primary motivation to help, is a complex interplay between all kinds of personally specific factors.
Clary et al [1] have famously categorised these motivational factors for volunteering.
What’s important, though, is how central understanding volunteering motivation is to good volunteer management. It comes back to understanding the needs of your volunteers, not just your beneficiaries.
It’s telling that research into what motivates us to work at all, can be boiled down to extrinsic and intrinsic motivational factors. Extrinsic factors are the typical carrots and sticks (like paying incentives or threatening disciplinary action)- the sledgehammers that managers of paid employees have relied on in the past.
Writers such as Dan Pink and Bruno Frey, make the point that managers are much more effective in motivating their employees if they can tap into the intrinsic motivators, those things within us that can drive us to be productive and achieve great things in our work. Such intrinsic motivators might be ambitions, dreams or even our simple desire to learn and improve at what we do.
An insight volunteer managers have always understood
This insight is nothing new to volunteer managers. Those who engage with volunteers have never had the chance to resort to the same extrinsic motivators with volunteers, such as offer financial incentives or threaten volunteers with the sack. As a result, any volunteer manager worth their salt, builds their volunteering programme with an eye to what it is that motivates their volunteers to engage and deliver services.
By the way, it’s for this reason that internships promising work, placements enforced by schools and explicit gifts incentivising volunteering are all controversial. They all suggest extrinsic motivations can play a substantial part in volunteering.
With online volunteering, extrinsic motivations is even further out of the picture.
As a result, it’s even more crucial that a volunteer working remotely should been driven by their own set of inner motivations. For example, the distance and the so-called online disinhibition effect can numb the emotional cost of walking away from the commitment or make it harder to block out competing demands on a volunteer’s time that may be physically more immediate to them than remote beneficiaries, tasks or duties undertaken.
This online ‘psychological’ distance can make it harder to establish the clarity needed to ensure that there’s a clear alignment between what the volunteer wants out of their volunteering experience and the purpose of the volunteering. There is always room for confusion and misinterpretation to occur, unless the online communication between volunteer manager and volunteer is carefully and shrewdly managed.
Ultimate success
Ultimately, the success of volunteering programmes lives and dies by this understanding of the motivations and needs in play when volunteers are involved in delivering services.
This means the volunteer manager (and their organisation) understanding why they are involving volunteers, but more crucially it means the volunteer manager understanding why volunteers get involved in the volunteering programme.
This understanding must be rendered explicit and renewed regularly by the volunteer manager, as all too often it is left at the level of implicit understanding which can become confused, misunderstood or altered over the lifetime of the volunteering programme.
The web while presenting many challenges in this respect, also presents us with new ways to understand and reconcile our motivations as volunteer managers with those of our volunteers, for the benefit of those that together we aim serve.
Notes
1. Clary, E., Snyder, M., Ridge, R., Copeland, J., Stukas, A., Haugen, J., Miene, P. (1998), ˜Understanding and assessing the motivations of volunteers: a functional approach’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 7 (6), pages 1516- 0.
