A Voluntary Divide? Exploring the Role of Digitalisation in German Rural Volunteering

Abstract

Rural communities have experienced significant changes in their social, economic and demographic structures, leading to an increased importance of volunteering. Such activities are related to traditional association structures, which seem to be declining in popularity. One of the current hopes for strengthening rural volunteering is digitalisation. This article examines the extent to which digitalisation has found its way into volunteering and how this is related to rural areas. It summarises the discourses on volunteering, rural areas and digitalisation and introduces a mixed-methods approach at the organisational level. Based on a nationwide survey and in-depth interviews with volunteers and experts, we present a digitalisation index to illustrate that digitalisation has found its way into rural volunteering, but not to the same extent everywhere. We suggest that the sparse use of distance-bridging digital tools is due to the structural peculiarities of rural voluntary organisations rather than stereotypical rural backwardness.