Volunteers are Consumers

Some of the best things I received from finishing my MBA were deep, meaningful thoughts on the work that I currently do rather than new, technical insights from the coursework. I suppose this is the point of graduate level work and ultimately why I wanted to go back to school.

A thought I’ve been contemplating for the past year revolves around the idea that individuals choose volunteer experiences no differently than they choose other experiential opportunities where time must be transacted.Volunteers are consumers looking to make a personal decision to transact their time for a perceived benefit or to receive the experience they desire regardless of the specific motivation.

I chose to focus on the motivations of volunteers with a concentration on faith-based volunteers for one of my major research projects. I focused on faith-based volunteers because NeighborLink is a faith-based organization that works primarily with churches, and I was hoping to learn more about why I get frustrated by the lack of action of a high majority of churches in our community. Of all places that should feel deep conviction about serving the poor and helping their neighbors, the Church should be leading the majority of grassroots community initiatives. Ultimately, I wanted to better understand why people choose to volunteer in the first place and what really motivates them.

The research led to a fairly simple realization. People are primarily motivated to volunteer because of social influence rather than deeper convictions or more strategic purposes. It didn’t matter whether they were motivated by faith, poverty, justice, or any other of the many individual motivations we could come up with. Approximately 85% of all volunteerism is in fact driven by social influences, which could be anything from family, friends, workplaces, churches, neighbors, social media postings, etc. In my mind, this simplifies things to the reality that it matters more about who I will be volunteering with rather than what I’ll be volunteering to do.

This is significant because it starts to inform me that folks aren’t initially interested in the specifics of the work we do as much as whether we have something that aligns with their social needs, or really their personal desires. It begins to make sense why a few times a year we get huge swings in volunteerism, traditional and social media pushes, a wave of donations, and a lot more kudos for our work in the community with little change to our intentional communication efforts. This pendulum swings in and out of our favor as a new wave of people discover and/or rediscover our significance. Some of that support results in new volunteers or donations, but most of it is simply increased social awareness.

Ultimately, volunteers are people and people are consumers driven by self-interest. Most of the volunteers we see at NeighborLink at any given time are on some sort of personal or professional development pursuit trying to grow in their faith, their skills, or explore the realm of serving others in an effort to find answers the internal tension they’re feeling. They’re not finding purpose in their job and want to do something meaningful with their lives. They don’t know what they want to do, so they give volunteerism a shot which allows them to do something completely different to learn a new skill or simply check out mentally. For those on a spiritual journey, they’re convicted by the Holy Spirit and are trying to be more obedient to their discipleship journey, which means they explore the areas of their world where they think Jesus would have spent His time. All of these are good and right reasons to volunteer, but they are all initially driven by a self-interest reason.

So what…. Well, I’m thinking hard about this reality and trying to expand my organizational worldview by realizing that I’m not simply competing with other nonprofits for volunteers or donations, I’m competing with every for-profit business looking to capitalize on discretionary time and money.

In my city, I must recognize that the demographic of my volunteers are making the decision of how to spend their weekend between time recreating on a lake, bicycle, or a festival versus helping their neighbors via volunteerism. I’m competing against shopping at the mall or funding a roofing project. I’m even competing against the TOMS shoes of the world who are adding social impact with consumer goods. It’s becoming harder to find brands not adding a social impact through profits to their business line.

Nonprofits hear it all the time. “I wish I had more time to give or more money to donate…” Almost every one of those people should say that they’re protected what they see as being more valuable to them rather than they don’t have more time or resources. So, how do we get them to believe we’re more valuable than they they’re spending time/money doing?

If the theory that social influence dictates 85% of volunteer engagement, then I have begin thinking about what’s influencing people that could possibly be involved at NeighborLink. I have to understand this reality in order to develop meaningful strategies to get the attention of those being influenced by the consumer realities around them. As much as I wish it wasn’t a reality, it is and it’s not going to change until we get them more involved.

The most successful organizations I’m attracted to have all figured this out. They’ve simplified their communication strategy, made their work as cool as they could, and create pathways to deeper engagement once they get that first connection with a new volunteer or donor.

I’ve got a ton to learn and this post is more about me processing out loud in order to invite commentary, but it has me focused on learning more about consumer research and analysis. I want to know what large brands do to study their consumers in order to understand their behaviors.

Have you been thinking about this? In what other ways are you noticing consumer trends in nonprofits? What have you been doing to bring this thinking into your organizations?