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

The bulk of the Literature, case studies and examples that we examined were from theUS, Canada, UK and Australia and in English. One of the team was Indonesian and ableto reflect upon the position of volunteering in another, non-western culture and so give adifferent perspective on how immigrants to Australia might react to campaigns.Nevertheless, this Report will have a bias that reflect western, anglophile outlooks andpractices.We found few papers and articles that gave findings of careful evaluations of differentapproaches to stimulating volunteering. So, our Report on this aspect lacks hard,empirical support for the findings. They are based upon what seem to us to be appropriategiven the material to which we were exposed. However, we have presented the materialin the Report in a form for others to mine as well.2. A Synopsis of findings from Journals, websites, government policies,working papers and books.The scope of findings covers various English-speaking countries namely Australia,Canada, the United Kingdom and US. Research findings are mostly found around theyear 2001 or thereafter with 2001 being ‘International Year of Volunteers’, and hencesuggesting increased interest in volunteering. This section aims to summarize theliterature review that is attached in Appendix B.Based on the literature review we observe that methods of promoting the notion ofvolunteering are mainly tactical in nature. Furthermore, these methods are presented asadvice or the ‘how’ aspect on conducting the promotion of volunteering. It is also foundthat the methods of promotion follow that of conventional marketing efforts such asthrough direct marketing, public relations, and media advertising via newspaper, radioand television. It is also observed that promotion efforts also include unpaid modesthrough media publicity, public displays and, more importantly and found most effective,word of mouth. These methods are essentially advice to non-profit organisation to adoptthe ‘conventional’ marketing approach. Some examples of methods used to promotevolunteering can be found in Appendix B.It appears that methods of promoting volunteering are closely related to methods ofvolunteer recruitment, although the two concepts differ. Methods of promotingvolunteering are often similar to volunteer recruitment such as by using media advertisingand word of mouth. Again, the ways of recruiting volunteers are tactical methods and donot provide insight into a strategic approach.The need for the government to take part in the promotion of volunteering is a commontheme observed in the research findings. Government role in the promotion ofvolunteering is evident in policies and initiatives. Furthermore, suggestions on what thegovernment can do in the promotion of volunteering is also apparent such as byfacilitating a relationship with the private sector, providing volunteering opportunities,6