Mobilising episodic volunteers for Mandela Day

Abstract

18 July is Mandela Day, an internationally recognised day of volunteering when people are called to take action against poverty and social injustice by helping and giving time in service to their communities. This article discusses the nature of episodic volunteering at Mandela Day events throughout South Africa in 2018. Drawing on quantitative survey evidence from 398 participants, the findings show that this informal day of service has created a unique opportunity for recruiting new volunteers and for promoting one-off, short-term volunteering. In addition to non-profits and faith-based groups that traditionally mobilise volunteers, we show that ‘third-party’ entities – such as universities, businesses, government offices and philanthropic foundations – are also critical in rallying people and facilitating one-off volunteering opportunities for this day. These findings broaden an understanding of the range of international episodic volunteering and help to illustrate the connection between volunteering and civic capacity in newer democracies.

Repeat and Non-returning Volunteers: The Promise of Episodic Events for Volunteer Recruitment and Retention

“…Scholarly research confirms this assumption, showing that one-off events are indeed impactful for attracting and possibly retaining new volunteers (Bang et al, 2009;Krasnopolskaya et al, 2016). Moreover, episodic volunteers do generally report a willingness to continue volunteering either with the same organization/event or with others (Compion et al, 2021;Pozzi et al, 2019).…”

“…Intention to volunteer is not the same as actual behavior, but it does provide a useful proxy with which to predict the prospect that someone might do as they propose. It is useful for statistically modeling the factors that might forecast continued volunteering (see Chaco ´n et al, 2007;Hyde et al, 2016;Compion et al, 2021).…”

Volunteer stewardship management models for volunteer programs

“…Often, such as the Olympic Games, these mega events change location every time. Mega events are can be seen as similar to national days of service (NDS) (Maas et al, 2020;Compion et al, 2020), an example of the intermediary management model to be discussed in the next section,.…”

“…The first manager is located in a home, sending theme such as, in the case of the intermediary model, a volunteer centre, thematic organizations such as single volunteers 2 or family volunteering 3 , or national days of service (see e.g. Compion et al, 2020, Maas et al, 2020 . In the secondary model, the home organization is a third party like companies and educational institutes (Haski-Leventhal, 2010).…”

“…In the last "intermediary management model", volunteers are accessed from throughout the broader community, for example, as in a public media campaign for an event like a National Day of Service (see e.g. Compion, Jeong, Cnaan, and Meijs, 2020). Seen from the four different volunteer stewardship models of Brudney et al (2019) event volunteering might involve all four models; these will be discussed below.…”