Beyond Motivation

Have you ever wondered: How come some young people volunteer while others don't?

I have!

The explanation might seen obvious. The literature that I'm familiar with offers two explanations. Put simply the first explanation is that what the organization has to offer do not fit with the young peoples values. The other explanation is that in recruitment situations the organization fails to reflect the core motivation factors (being part of a community, make a difference or upgrade own skills). Hence young people don't see what's in it for them!

Now, while I recognize these explanations, I also want to listen to the young people who wouldn't volunteer. What are their explanations?

At the last organization I worked for I arranged to focus group interviews for the same group of eight young persons (aged 19-21). Both the focus groups where designed to let the group discuss what volunteerism meant to them in different ways.

Not surprisingly I heard many familiar explanations (sometimes nearly articulated in the focus group as excuses!). Some of the reasons not to volunteer was lack of time, that voluntary work required organizing and planing skills, the felt insecure of what was expected of them and felt the possible risk of loosing ones face to friends and other persons.

I asked myself: What happens if I regard these explanations as attempts to give the word 'volunteerism' a certain meaning? This question is particular interesting if we remember that the premise when doing focus group interview is that the participants tries to position themselves to one another. Basically this means that they try to define who is hot and who is not in the group when discussing the topics.

In this perspective 'volunteerism' can be given many different meanings when a participant tried to position themselves to the others. These different meanings are expression of certain discourses that are available to the participants. A discourse, put simply, is a way to think of and explain phenomena the world. The point is simply that different discourses offer different meanings of volunteerism, and in a discussion the participants choose which discourse to use when explaining what volunteerism is to them.

With this insight we can turn back to the explanations offered by the participants and look at them from another perspective. In this perspective lack of time does not mean that the participants do not have time for doing voluntary work. It means that volunteerism is giving the meaning of being time consuming. Turning to 'required organizing and planing skills' means that volunteerism is giving the meaning of being complex and difficult.

Volunteerism was discussed back and forth by using many of the tools offered by qualitative research, but what can we use these results for?

We can use the results to look beyond motivation in recruitment situations. When young people do not volunteer it does not automatically means, that your organization's values misfit or that you fail to promote core motivation factors. The results offer this explanation: When young people choose not to volunteer they do so because volunteerism has a certain meaning to them (to time consuming and so).

Beyond motivation!

Instead of focussing on all the things that motivate young people to volunteer when recruiting, I focus on the different roles that volunteers enter in the organization. I promote three roles when recruiting:

1. The busy volunteer (approx. 2-4 hours of work one or two days, no responsibility, and no specific requirements to skills)

2. The project-oriented volunteer (working 'behind' the project with planing and coordination, are engaged over a longer period, and are upgrading their skills)

3. The inspiring volunteer (wants to convince others about the cause of the organization, doing speeches and lobbying, do not necessarily engage over a long period)

This way I show the young people that volunteerism do not only mean something time consuming, I show them that the project-oriented work is just one of three ways to volunteer, and I show that not all ways of volunteering include the risk of loosing face to ones friends or other persons.

My point is this: We need to look beyond motivation as core explanation to what trickers volunteer engagement for young people - we need to see beyond that to discover new ways to unfold recruitment situations.

/Frederik/Ingerfair Consulting/Denmark

(Unfortunately the research report is written in Danish)