Trends and Issues

More and more, companies want to engage their communities through employee volunteering programs. For most businesses, this means calling a nonprofit and scheduling an activity. The nonprofits that can readily design and host successful employee volunteering events will find themselves critical and necessary assets in what has quickly become a key business strategy. Understanding why employee volunteering is important to companies is key to creating a good partnership. In this article, author Chris Jarvis provides some insights into what companies want from employee volunteering programs, and how nonprofits can position themselves as an indispensable corporate partner.

In this issue, author Laurie Mook looks at an interesting case study of the Philadelphia Ronald McDonald House as an example of how to measure the direct impact of volunteer service on the organization, clients and volunteers themselves. The research – conducted by Debbie Haski-Leventhal (Australia School of Business), Lesley Hustinx (Ghent University, Belgium), and Femida Handy (University of Pennsylvania) – is based on a series of surveys, informal interviews and observations through the researchers’ own involvement as volunteers in the organization.

As Mook explains, volunteer managers often view the monetary value placed upon volunteer service as one way to gauge the relative importance of volunteer resources as compared to other resources in delivering the services of a nonprofit. And, according to Mook, volunteer hours are also used as a proxy for impact.  But through this case study, Mook explores a few more tools. For example, the findings in this study reveal several areas of impact that can be measured. From the perspective of the client, three categories of impact emerge: tangible impact (providing services), attitudes (satisfaction and perceived altruism) and future behavior (willingness to volunteer). From the perspective of the volunteer, intrinsic and tangible benefits are identified. Overall, the researchers are able to communicate the distinctive and unique impact that the volunteers had for the organization. 

In 2004 and again in 2010, Along the Web explored the topic of volunteers in arts, heritage and culture.  In this issue, we revisit that sector to look at volunteers’ input that relates specifically to public library services. Whether funded by governments, philanthropists, donors or private subscription, libraries are universal and one of the most egalitarian of services in their reach and access. But surprisingly, the extent of involvement of volunteers in library services varies widely, from a great deal to very little at all. In this article, Arnie Wickens explores how trying to discover the real impact volunteers make on library services – beyond just the numbers of people involved, what they do, or the hours that they give – is almost impossible.

In this Voices, we underscore the fact that Steve McCurley has been remarkably prolific during his career. His earliest publications (1972- 2004) are listed in a 10-page, single-spaced bibliography on the Energize Web site. As the Director of Research for the National Center for Voluntary Action (the predecessor of the predecessor of the predecessor of Points of Light), he often contributed to their magazine, Voluntary Action Leadership, with his first article appearing in the Fall 1976 issue. We present an excerpt from that article in this issue of Voices, along with excerpts from a number of Steve's long out-of-print articles, including items he wrote for “Grapevine,” the bi-monthly newsletter he produced with Sue Vineyard beginning in the 1980s. You’ll be surprised at how much of Steve’s “Early McCurley” material still resonates in today’s world.

In this Research to Practice, author Laurie Mook reviews the use of social computing technologies by volunteer coordinators at nonprofit organizations. Mook looks at research on use and non-use of technology, based on interviews with 23 volunteer coordinators from three different metropolitan areas of the western United States. The study was conducted by Amy Voida, Ellie Harmon and Ban Al-Ani of the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.

As background, the researchers take the perspective that the work of volunteer coordinators is bridge-building work—bringing together numerous public constituencies as well as constituencies within their organizations. And one might expect that this class of work would be well supported by social software, some of which has been found to enable bridging social capital. However, the researchers find that, in many ways, this class of technology fails to adequately support volunteer coordinators’ bridge-building work.  The study then offers a number of strategies for bridge-building via social computing technologies, reviews the numerous challenges faced by volunteer coordinators in their use of these technologies, and presents opportunities for designing social software to better support bridge-building between organizations and the public.

What does the field think about credentialing? In this Keyboard Roundtable, volunteer management colleagues from the UK, USA, New Zealand and Australia provide their personal and widely different perspectives on the value of a professional credential. One expert thinks credentialing can be a good thing, while another believes it is a waste of time. Yet another expert debates whether credentialing is the right thing for volunteer managers as a whole, while another questions if the field could be better at credentialing and what that means.

This special Keyboard Roundtable clearly presents some very personal opinions from people who must weigh the credentialing dilemma in their own career paths. We hope these perspectives challenge e-Volunteerism readers to share their own views and opinions, too. 

This quarter’s Research to Practice approaches the issue of credentialing in volunteer management by looking at one possible framework for evaluating the effects of credentialing or not credentialing. For this review, writer Laurie Mook turns to David Suárez, Ph.D., a well-known researcher in nonprofit management who developed a typology of nonprofit sector leaders for his article, “Street Credentials and Management Backgrounds: Careers of Nonprofit Executives in an Evolving Sector,” published in the journal Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly in 2010.

As Mook points out, Suárez, assistant professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Policy, Planning and Development, frames his work in a typology of four 'ideal' types of nonprofit leaders. Suárez bases these types on two factors:  the degree of nonprofit experience, and the extent of management background and credentials.  In this Research to Practice, Mook switches the focus from the nonprofit as a whole to the volunteer management function.  In doing so, Mook is able to ponder some important research questions of her own. For instance, is  volunteer retention more likely to be higher in a volunteer program directed by someone with lots of nonprofit experience but no credentials? Or is volunteer retention higher in a program directed by someone with little nonprofit experience but with credentials?  Mook’s review of Suárez’ work and her valuable insights provide an important addition to e-Volunteerism’s special issue on credentialing