With the demographic changes in our modern societies and the economic pressures to reform the welfare state, volunteer work to provide social services has increased in importance. From several studies we know, however, that work for volunteer organizations is in decline. Thus, the question of ``what motivates volunteers?" will gain in importance over time.
While a series of studies have already addressed this question by using surveys and experiments, we still fail to have firm knowledge of the motivation of volunteers. More precisely, recent work suggests that volunteer work can be stimulated most successfully if incentives offered to volunteers are tailored to the latter's initial motivation in joining a volunteer organization. Studies employing surveys of volunteers can, however, because of problems of self-selection, hardly yield definite conclusions on the varying effects of incentives offered to volunteers. Similarly, they fail to allow for studying the long term effects of motivations and incentives.
The goal of the proposed research project is to gain a firmer understanding how motivations and incentives for volunteer work interact. Of crucial interest will be the question what role egotistical and altruistic motivations play in the recruitment process and over the longer term in a volunteer's career. The use of a field experiment in collaboration with volunteer organizations will allows us to overcome the shortcomings of existing work. In this field experiment we first wish to assess the effect of persuasive motivational messages on potential volunteers. In a second step, selective incentives will be used in order to test their effect on volunteer satisfaction and volunteer commitment. The study will be run in co-operation with nonprofit organizations that accommodate new volunteers in their existing volunteering structures.
Given the experimental setting we will be able to precisely trace the effect of incentives on volunteer work and follow also the induced changes in motivations. The insights gained will not only close an important gap in the literature, but also be of practical value to third sector organizations in order recruit and retain volunteers.