Please, no more research into volunteer motivation

Just the other day I was browsing volunteer management stories online and came across an article published by ProBono Australia entitled, “QLD to investigate volunteer numbers”.

To put the article in context, earlier this year the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) reported the first ever drop in the numbers of people volunteering in Australia: 31 per cent of Australians volunteered compared to 36 per cent just four years ago[1].

In response to this decline, the recent ProBono Australia article states that:

Researchers at Cancer Council Queensland and Griffith University have received a $220,000 Australian Research Council grant to improve understanding of motivations for volunteering. Cancer Council Queensland CEO and lead researcher Professor Jeff Dunn AO said the study could help to improve social and economic well-being by stimulating volunteering.

This grant is one of only nine awarded the ARC Linkage Grant nationally (in Australia) in the field of psychology, and one of two in Queensland.

Professor Dunn is quoted as saying:

“Not for Profits such as Cancer Council Queensland rely heavily on volunteers to carry out work in cancer control, ensuring the delivery of vital community services and fundraising events - which is why it’s imperative we invest time and research into this area.”

“Our aim is to address knowledge gaps about short-term volunteering, to improve uptake of regular volunteering, and to evaluate the economic and social impacts of volunteering."

“It is critical that we understand how we can make short-term volunteering a satisfying experience to encourage longer-term relationships."

“The findings will inform recommendations for sectoral policy and practice on volunteering.”

“At the moment, little is known about why people take up volunteering, and the factors that inspire them to volunteer on a short or long-term basis."

I think these aims are laudable ones. Much more work needs to be done to develop better ways of measuring the impact of volunteering. Research that helps Volunteer Managers and volunteer involving organisations transition people from shorter-term to longer-term (i.e. regular) volunteering is also needed. Both are topics I have blogged about before[2].

However, I do have a major issue with that last quote from Prof Dunn, “At the moment, little is known about why people take up volunteering, and the factors that inspire them to volunteer on a short or long-term basis."

What, you mean like these studies and articles?

• Developing the Volunteer Motivation Inventory to Assess the Underlying Motivational Drives of Volunteers in Western Australia
• Helping others, helping ourselves
• Want better volunteers? Understand their motivation
• Understanding and Assessing the Motivations of Volunteers: A Functional Approach
• An analysis of volunteer motivation: implications for international development, VAJ 2008 (Vol 9, number 1)

Or perhaps Prof Dunn means the 260,000 search results from Google Scholar when you type in “volunteer motivation research”!?

The fact is that the motivation of people to volunteer is the most over-researched topic in volunteering research. In my opinion it also one of the least helpful areas of research to help Volunteer Managers in their day-to-day work. Why? Because such studies are so generic they actually help you when you have a mix of people wanting to give time all of whom have differing motivations and interests.

As Susan J Ellis says:

“I question the relevance of the question why do people volunteer?; when asked generically. Too many studies (not only those on motivation, I might add) approach volunteers as if they are indistinguishable from one another and are interchangeable parts of some monolith. After all, do we think it’s interesting to ask, why do people take paying jobs?”

I firmly believe that all anyone needs to know about volunteer motivation can be summed up in five points:

1. Every person’s motivational mix is different
2. Every person’s motivation mix changes
3. Every person has a differing mix of altruistic and egoistic reasons for volunteering
4. Nobody wants to have their time wasted, not matter how little or how much they give
5. Everybody who volunteers wants to make a difference

So please researchers, no more studies on motivation.

Please funders, no more giving significant amounts of money to study topics that have been explored to death already.

Instead, I encourage anyone who wants to do some academic research on volunteering to take a look at this blog post by Susan J Ellis from 1998 and the associated article Susan wrote for the Journal of Voluntary Action Research back in 1985!

I’ll end with three questions for you to consider and respond via the comments below:

1. What research questions would you like to see studied?
2. If you could communicate with academics, what would you want them to know that would be helpful to you?
3. Have you read any studies that you were able to apply to your work?

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1. For an excellent analysis of the decline and what it might mean for volunteering in Australia take a look at Volunteering Tasmania CEO, Adrienne Piccone’s, excellent blog post, “Is the decline in volunteering cause for panic?”.  ↩

2. See these three blog posts for example: Five things I’d like to say about calculating the economic value of volunteering; Volunteering: measuring what counts; and Short-term thinking on long-term volunteering.  ↩

Five things I'd like to say about calculating the economic value of volunteering

Since incorporating Volunteering England into their work, NCVO have started producing some good blogs on volunteering. These are mainly written by their Executive Director of Volunteering & Development, Justin Davis Smith (former Volunteering England CEO) but good material from other authors appears too.

Just a few weeks ago a new blog post appeared entitled "Five things you need to know about calculating the economic value of volunteering". This post summarised a paper from Jakub Dostál and Marek Vyskočil of Masaryk University’s Department of public economy and administration which won the prize for best paper in the New Researcher’s Session at the Voluntary Sector and Volunteering Research Conference 2014.

In the post there are five tips for "confronting economic calculations in your work or in someone else’s". As I read the article I started to feel downhearted yet again at the lack of awareness of the dangers of perpetuating the myth of economic value of volunteering and the absence of vision or ambition to do any better.

I'm not going to attempt a full analysis of the pitfalls of attributing notional wage 'values' to the work of volunteers. My American colleague Jayne Cravens has written an excellent commentary on the problems of valuing volunteers in economic terms. I've also written an analysis of the well intentioned by flawed efforts by the International Labor (sic) Organisation (ILO) to capture economic measures of volunteering globally in their Manual on the Measurement of Volunteer Work. If you are interested in exploring this topic in more depth then both those sources are good starting points.

What I do want to do is provide five responses to the five things the NCVO blog (author unknown) tells us we need to know about measuring the economic value of volunteering.


1 - Remember it's an estimate
Yes it is, but everyone from the ILO down seems so wedded to it that almost no energy is being invested in coming up with something better. Economic value is measured because it's easy, not because it's the best thing to measure. That speaks volumes about the actual value placed on the contribution of volunteer to society when so little effort is willing to be spent trying to get more accurate.


2 - Estimates rely significantly on the type of replacement wage
I absolutely agree with the author here. They flag up why economic measures of volunteering are not only an estimate but a poor one at that. The ILO manual does try to standardise this but in practice that's an approach that is far more complex and involved than people are usually willing to be. Remember, this is an area where we can't even be bothered to develop a decent measure, just the easiest estimate.


3 - There are still good reasons for using the concept of replacement wages
No there aren't!

First of all, economic measures focus on wage replacement methodologies (i.e. attributing a notional wage value to the work done by volunteers) don't actually measure an output or on outcome. Rather, they attribute a financial amount to an input, namely the time that volunteers give. In my view they therefore fail to calculate any kind of meaningful value to the work of volunteers. Rather they ascribe an economic amount to something we'd never pay for anyway. Even if we did accept that there was some kind of value in these measures, it is calculated on the same terms as paid work, from which we know volunteering is distinctive.

In an age where demonstrating actual value - the contribution made to society, the difference made by giving time - is increasingly critical, whether in effectively recognising volunteers for the work they do or for securing income from funders, we have got to get better at evidencing this for volunteering. Replacement wage calculations do not do this and need replacing with something much better.

Second, the author argues that we should use economic measures because there are existing "statistical systems and surveys". That's following the same line of reasoning as before - we'll measure it because it's easy not because it's the right thing to do. They try to justify this by saying that in the absence of any other methodologies we should go with what we've got lest we end up with something of lower quality, done without academic support.

Frankly, this is someone saying, "Look, this is what we are prepared to measure. If you don't like it then we think you couldn't possibly come up with something yourselves and because academics wouldn't be involved if you did it wouldn't be any good".


4 - Ask for more: don’t forget future research
Here, the article's author accepts that there may be a better measure out there and that we should always ask for more. In fact, they say the academic world should ask for more but given the attitudes we've seen thus far I'd argue that it is the volunteering movement that should ask for more. For more interest in this topic by academics. For more vision and ambition that just settling for what's easy to measure. For more respect for the intelligence of leaders and managers of volunteers rather than assuming superiority over us.

They also argue that what we have now is better than we've had in the past. I'd make two observations here.

First, what we have now is not that different than we had 15-20 years ago. Progress on measuring the true value of volunteering is glacial. We may well ask for more but if we carry on as we are we're looking at decades passing before we get anything better.

Second, is what we have now actually better than not having economic measures for volunteering? Do statements like "Volunteers are worth £500m to the NHS" help? Do they instead suggest to ill-informed decision makers that they could cut budgets and get volunteers in for free instead? Big Society anyone? I'm sure many could do without these problems which we encounter because flawed economic measures of volunteering are so common.


5 - Not everything that counts can be counted
Here, the author acknowledges that other methods of calculating true value such as SROI exist. Again though, they state that these, "measure the social impact of volunteering, but it is extremely difficult to cover all the many types of benefits". So they conclude their article with an admission that its hard, so we'll stick what what we've got. Easy is better than meaningful. Again! Sigh.


What do you think?

Are there better ways to measure the value of the contribution volunteers make to society? What are they and how do they work?

What's been your experience (good and bad) of using economic measures of volunteering?

Is there anything else you'd like to say?

The smokescreen of charity CEO pay

What charities pay their Chief Executives continues to be a topic grabbing headlines in sector and mainstream media alike here in the UK.

I have to admit, I remain slightly perplexed about the issue. 

Perhaps it’s because my career has been spent mainly dealing with the vast majority of the charity ‘workforce’, the volunteers who get paid nothing; without whom most charities, large and small, would be nothing; and without whom almost nobody who draws a salary in a charity - CEOs included - would have a job. 

Perhaps its because those who do the complex and challenging role of leading and managing volunteers get paid so poorly compared to their peers in, say, fundraising. In fact many are volunteers themselves and their work is essential to the delivery of important services to people across the country.

Either way the charity CEO pay debate rumbles on. And on. And on.

I was struck recently by a piece in Civil Society which reported the shadow charities minister, Lisa Nandy MP, “has warned that charity leadership needs to tackle the problem of unfair pay ratios in charities”.

Once I got over the shock of an MP preaching about pay to a group of charities I read on to discover that this warning was issued in the context of a debate about the future of charities. 

Is this really the most important strategic issue facing the charity world at the moment? I’m not saying it may not be important at all but I can think of many other issues much more worth of attention.

Nandy also apparently criticised charities for taking on an increasing number of unpaid interns, sometimes “with connections to established staff”. Another issue MPs are uniquely qualified to lecture charities on because, as we know, involving unpaid interns, sometimes people with connections to the MP themselves, NEVER happens does it? 

Regardless, if this is happening in the charity sector (and nobody is producing evidence to prove it), then it warrants a better debate that unpaid = bad, paid = good, as I have blogged before.

The debate then seems to have moved into discussion of the ratio between what a charity CEO is paid and what frontline workers are paid. Again, no recognition that the vast majority of frontline workers in charities get no pay at all and so such ratios are totally meaningless! 

But let’s just go with it and assume that frontline workers in charities are all paid.

Cath Bavage, CEO of Volunteer Centre Tower Hamlets, is quoted by Civil Society as saying:

“NCVO sounds pleased with itself that its own ratio of senior executive to lowest-paid staff member is 8:1. Is its chief executive really worth eight times more than an administrator? Does he work hard? Yes, probably. Does he work eight times harder, or does he have eight times more impact? I very much doubt it.”

"Why isn’t NCVO arguing for flatter pay structures and a more even distribution of wages in the voluntary sector? Surely a ratio of 2:1 or 3:1 would be a far better thing in charities with limited funds? It would help reassure donors that their money is being spent prudently and would better reward frontline staff who often work in emotionally demanding jobs. "

To which I would respond:

No, the CEO of NCVO probably doesn’t work eight times harder or have eight times more impact. No CEO does. But pay is not a measure of how hard someone works or how much impact they have. On that basis the volunteer lifeboat crew member would be paid a small fortune for each life they save and we’d have every Samaritan in the country in the top tax bracket. 

[Interestingly, research seems to suggest its not what we pay people but how we pay people that makes a difference.]

Surely what would reassure donors that their money is being spent prudently is whether the organisation makes best use of all the resources at its disposal and, in that broader context, whether salaries are being paid for the right kind of roles and then (finally) at the right kind of levels.

Assume for a minute that we have two organisations doing similar work with similar budgets. As a donor, I would be wanting to ask questions if organisation A was paying someone £20,000 to do a role that Organisation B fulfilled just as well through volunteers. That suggests that rather than exploring all the options for fulfilling its mission, organisation A just paid someone whereas organisation B created a volunteer programme to achieve that goal and used £18,000 (because volunteering may be freely given but it is not cost free) for something else, perhaps paying for someone to do a role that organisation A can’t do because it doesn’t have enough money.

Maybe the reason I feel perplexed about the charity CEO debate is that it appears to be a smokescreen for any kind of real debate about far more important issues. Issues like whether charities are really doing the best with what they have available for the most vulnerable in society, or whether all this talk of charities actually ignores the majority of charities in favour of the minority who receive the biggest slice of charitable income. Surely they are far more important topics to consider when thinking about the future of the sector than government, the sector’s infrastructure bodies and CEOs remaining inwardly focused on what they earn and whether they should earn it?

For some intelligent and informed exploration of the charity CEO pay debate, check out these two pieces from nfpSynergy:

A Chief Concern; shedding some light on charity CEO salaries

An executive decision; three things the charity CEO salary maelstrom taught us and what to do about it

Lies damned lies and statistics

So the new Community Life Survey (successor to the Citizenship Survey) is out and the headline is an apparent vindication of Big Society as the proportion of people doing any volunteering (formal and informal) between August and October 2012 has increased to 71% from the last Citizenship Survey figure of 65%.

Except that isn't the whole story and things aren't as rosy as the government may have you believe, at least to these eyes. 

From my reading of the data, formal volunteering at least once a month and once a year have risen back to 2005 levels after a dip over the last few years. 

However, we have to be cautious. Remember, the results are for August to October 2012 so it could be a post-Olympic blip. I don't imagine the field work was done in Stratford amongst people wearing pink and purple! As Helen Timbrell of the National Trust suggested to me yesterday, people may have been more ready to see what they already do as volunteering due to the higher public awareness of volunteers during the Games.

Furthermore, as the trend data above shows there have been fluctuations up and down over the last thirteen years, the last peak coming around the Year of The Volunteer in 2005 which was a concerted campaign to get more people giving time. 

So, whilst the headline is encouraging, we'll have to wait for future Community Life results to see if the increase in volunteering is sustained.

In terms of the headline figure that 71% of people did formal or informal volunteering at least once a year, that may be up on 2009/10 and 2010/11's figures of 66% & 65% but these figures were skewed downward by a sharp and unexpected drop in levels of informal volunteering (see below). Additionally, an overall rate of 71% is the same as 2008-09, down on 2007/08 (73%) and lower than at any other time since the citizenship survey started. Hardly a vindication for the Big Society. If anything, it shows that we're back to where we were four / five years ago.

The good news is informal volunteering which saw a big dip in 2009/10 & 2010/11 (and which nobody could explain at the time ) is back up to the level of before 09/10, albeit at a slight decrease and 6% lower than in 2001. Again, we're back to where we were four / five years ago.

So, in summary, whilst the headlines may be all about the success of the coalition government's policies to get us volunteering more, the reality is perhaps more cautious. As with all data, trends need to be seen over time and at least with the Community Life survey we have trackable data on volunteering once more. I hope the upswing will continue but for now I think we have to be careful about assuming government policy is working as well as Whitehall suggest when the real story is we are back to where we were in 2008/09 (i.e. pre-recession).

What do you think?