1. 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:
45th ARNOVA conference, November 18, 2016

2. 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.

3. 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)

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

6. Open Science Framework, osf.io
This new project is at

7. 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.

8. 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

9. 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
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10. American Economic Review 100 (September 2010): 1358–1398 http://www

11. 2011 IEEE International Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk, and Trust, and IEEE International Conference on Social Computing

12. Mechanisms identified thus far

13. 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

14. Coauthors and initial funding
Arjen de Wit – Erik van Ingen – Marjolein Broese
Want to join? Contact: René Bekkers,