Human resources in nonprofit organizations: factors influencing the volunteering activities

Abstract

In our world today organizations that provide community development programs are becoming more and more essential. With several countries going below poverty lines, and the increase in wars in the last few years along with the absence of government help in more than one country. Thus, the need for help is increasing in order to assist communities in building on the main principle of life which is to preserve humanity, by providing the minimum needed to preserve the human lives and supplying the commodities that are essential for human beings in order to live. These basic commodities include, but are not limited to, clothing, shelter, food and water. Moreover, these organizations rely heavily on their human resources to function properly and specifically on volunteers. Due to the advantages that volunteers bring on board to the organization, these prove to be an important asset to such organizations. Our concern in this study was mainly to address the following questions: How will external factors affect the levels of the supply of volunteers? Will economical factors, other than the level of employment, affect the volunteering levels? Will other factors such as the social impact and the political stability have an effect on the volunteering levels and how? As volunteers and nonprofit organizations are distributed worldwide, thus our study had an international perspective and its application therefore will be based on the situation of the country within the organization lies. In our study we have followed the conceptual framework and by collecting and analyzing data, we were able to devise some important findings. The resulting findings where the assertion that global factors do have implications on the volunteer supply, in fact there is a positive relationship between these and the supply of volunteers. In other words, when economies are in a recession and the country is in an unstable political situation with deteriorating levels of social engagement, the supply of volunteers will decrease and vice versa. Thus, our findings could prove worthy on the managerial level for those organizations, as managers will understand the dynamics of the affects of the global factors on the level of supply of volunteers and thus they will be able to devise better recruitment plans and strategies, since they will have a better vision of the dynamics within the volunteers market.