Why do people volunteer? A systematic review of the literature René Bekkers*, Erik van Ingen#, Arjen de Wit*, and Marjolein Broese van Groenou# * Philanthropic Studies # Department of Sociology VU University Amsterdam OSF: https://osf.io/atbjm/ 45th ARNOVA conference, November 18, 2016

What do we know for certain about what makes people volunteer? Almost all of the research published on volunteering relies on surveys which do not allow for causal inference. That body of research tells us a lot about who volunteers. However, we know very little about why they volunteer – i.e. the conditions that make people volunteer. Measures of volunteer motivation such as the Volunteer Function Inventory (Clary et al., 1998) can only be used among those who are already volunteering. In the USA and the Netherlands philanthropic crowdfunding makes up for less than 1 per cent of the total fundraising amount As a result of the absence of a financial compensation, prosocial behavior is expected to be a dominant incentive and influence in philanthropic crowdfunding Previous research: offline contexts with mainly personal contact between the solicitor and donor Mention: From now on we refer to crowdfunding instead of the full term philanthropic crowdfunding.

What Social Surveys Don’t Tell About Volunteering “Much of what passes for theory in sociology is little more than empirical generalizations that describe regularities in the data that have been elevated to the status of ‘laws’ ” “We know that certain properties of individuals tend to be correlated but we do not know why.” John Wilson (2005)

Belluz & Hoffman (2015): The one chart you need to understand any health study. VOX, http://www.vox.com/ 2015/1/5/7482871/t ypes-of-study-design

http://www.giving.nl/ https://renebekkers.wordpress.com/2015/11/11/four-reasons-why-we-are-converting-to-open-science/

Open Science Framework, osf.io This new project is at https://osf.io/atbjm/

Strategy We start from the mechanisms that make people give (Bekkers & Wiepking, 2011, NVSQ) and apply them to volunteering. We try to find ALL experiments with volunteering as an outcome variable ever conducted. We categorize the results and (meta-)analyze them. Later, we will ask volunteers and practitioners what they think makes people volunteer. We confront the three sets of results. The field experiment included two conditions. In the ‘reference’ condition, a reference amount was suggested to provide donors with a social norm. In this condition, participants can read that “Did you know that on average donors on Voordekunst donate 82 euros?”. The reference amount is the actual average of all individual donations on the platform (i.e. excluding donations from companies) of the last six months of the previous year. In the ‘base’ condition, no reference was suggested. The moment a participants enters the website, he or she is divided into one of the two conditions based on internet cookies. Meaning that, they are in the same condition even if they visit multiple projects or revisit the platform another day.

The seven mechanisms 1. Altruism When the material, social or psychological needs of recipients are more severe, people will volunteer more – e.g. in disasters 2. Solicitation The mere fact of being asked to volunteer greatly increases the likelihood that people do so – that’s why I am your new secretary 3. Costs and benefits People volunteer more when the material costs of doing so are lower and the benefits are higher – free t-shirt, day off, hotel room 4. Reputation Volunteers are more strongly motivated when they receive public recognition from the organization – hence the prizes 5. Psychological costs and benefits Volunteering is more likely and sustainable when the psychological costs of doing so are lower and the benefits are higher – e.g. pride, respect 6. Values Endorsement of values that are expressed by the organization makes people volunteer 7. Efficacy The more positive the perception and evaluation of the usefulness of the output, outcome and impact, the more likely people are to volunteer

Some sobering numbers Search Keywords Results Hits among first 100 New Hits #1 “volunteering” 281,000 #2 “volunteering experiment” 43,800 14 #3 “volunteer work” 78,300 #4 “volunteer work” experiment 22,600 10 7 #n All of the above ???

American Economic Review 100 (September 2010): 1358–1398 http://www

2011 IEEE International Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk, and Trust, and IEEE International Conference on Social Computing

Mechanisms identified thus far

What’s in the works + some striking findings Code the discipline, published in journal (no/yes), findings positive? Many field experiments with online volunteering in computer science. Thus far, 76% is a positive finding; 90% of journal articles, 60% of working papers 75% of experiments were field experiments, 25% lab Quantify the quality of the experiment

Coauthors and initial funding Arjen de Wit – Erik van Ingen – Marjolein Broese Want to join? Contact: René Bekkers, r.bekkers@vu.nl