Understanding the Value of Volunteer Involvement

Abstract

Volunteers can be an important resource of many nonprofit organizations. The ability to meet the mission, goals and objectives of nonprofit organizations often depends upon the effectiveness of volunteer involvement in direct service delivery or indirect program support. Volunteer involvement utilizes financial and non-financial resources of an organization. Given the challenges associated with coordinating and managing volunteers, nonprofit organizations should evaluate volunteer program initiatives. Utilizing a net benefits framework, this study evaluated volunteer programs in 4-H to understand the value of direct and indirect volunteer involvement. Findings showed county 4-H programs that utilized volunteers to provide direct service to clientele as-well-as volunteers in indirect program support roles had nearly 50% higher total benefits compared to programs that only used direct service volunteers. Additionally, results indicated challenges associated with coordinating and managing volunteers did not increase for programs that involve both direct and indirect volunteers compared to those that only utilized direct service volunteers. Finally, this research provided evidence that net benefits accrued at a higher rate for nonprofits that utilize both direct and indirect service volunteers compared to those involving only direct service volunteers.

Staff and volunteers’ perceptions of the volunteer programme: an alternative use of the Net Benefits Index

“…Hager and Brudney's approach -and that adopted by Terry, Harder and Pracht (2011) Addington-Hall and Karlsen (2005) found that hospice volunteers were significantly more likely than nurses to feel highly valued, to report that morale was high and that any disagreements between different groups had an insignificant impact on teamwork. Nevertheless, volunteers were significantly more likely to state that they did not receive a great deal of support from hospice staff, and nurses revealed they were unlikely to receive a great deal of support from volunteers.…”

“…In their study, 8% were negative about their volunteer programmes (challenges outweighed benefits), 24% received a positive score (benefits outweighed challenges) between 0 and 5, 42% a score between 5 and 10, and only 26% scored above 10 (out of a maximum of 16). Terry, Harder and Pracht (2011) also utilised this approach in the US youth program 4-H, finding that services that included volunteers in a variety of roles were likely to score more highly, but that 21% of the 4-H programs scored more challenges than benefits (compared to 8% in Hager and Brudney).…”

Understanding Organizational Commitment Among Scout Volunteers Within Non-Formal Education

“…NFE is having similar purpose with extension education that is activities which concern on conducting outside formal institution. Based on nonprofit view, volunteer can be included as an essential foundation of many nonprofit organizations (NPO) (Terry, Harder, & Pracht, 2011). It was notified that an organization will get benefit from volunteerism since it volunteerism will saving the cost (Allen et al, 1989).…”

“…According to Merriam and Cafarrella (1999), NFE is the opposite of formal learning or education which is gotten outside educational society. 4H activities for youth (Terry et al, 2011) or other youth organization such as scouting (Vaske, 2008) are several example of NFE. As aforementioned earlier, NFE cannot be separated from extension education part since both of those learning are similar that is providing social services to the community especially in education area.…”

“…From NFE area, volunteer having role as the organizer, program developer and partner offering attention out of educational institution. Moreover, volunteer can be identified as mentor and provider within NFE experiences especially for youth (Terry et al, 2011). Meanwhile from the non-profit view, volunteers can be seen as an essential foundation of many non-profit organizations (Terry et al, 2011).…”