Marketing Initiatives and Campaigns to promote Volunteering - a ...

sites. All material stressed that word-of-mouth, or personalrecommendation, was the most effective stimulus to gaining volunteers.In fact, recruiting volunteers had many similarities to recruitingemployees and just as it was wise to reject, or deter, some potentialpeople for employment we observed that it can be wise to havein campaigns ways of deterring the wrong sort of people.There is evidence that some organizations that rely on volunteers need anincreased skill level in these. This mirrors the experience in the paid workarena.6. Some community activities more easily attract volunteers than others.Others can be made more adoptable by using the lessons fromconsiderable research on the Adoption of Innovations (see Section 6 of theReport).7. For all sorts of reasons, given throughout the Report and in Section 7,some people in the community are more likely to become volunteers.Their motivations for and expectations about volunteering are different anddiverse and so campaigns aimed at them, and the methods and channels ofcommunication are different.People who may have come from the UK some time ago and lived in aWelfare State may not believe there is much of a need for volunteersbeyond the very traditional sort, like giving blood. They may even resentcalls for volunteers. People from Asian countries automatically ‘volunteer’to assist their extended family and expect others to do the same. Somepeople come from a religious background that ‘requires’ members to lookafter the needy.10. The motives that historically seem to lead people to volunteer can becategorized into senses of: Altruism, Egotism, Collectivism andPrinciplism. However, governments in some western countries arebeginning to add: Obligation.We found that the motives of Young people differed between the US andthe UK. In the US they can be paid but there is a sense of it neverthelessbeing a duty whereas in the UK the motivations were more utilitarian inthings like ‘improving skills’ and ‘increased employability’ whilenevertheless ‘wanting to make a difference.’In some categories of volunteering there are strong family traditions ofundertaking it.28