Data behind national volunteering strategy revealed

The research underpinning Volunteering Australia’s national strategy is now available and although it makes for hard reading, there is also cause for optimism as the sector unites for change.

The sobering reality underpinning Volunteering Australia’s national strategy on volunteering is now apparent, with the release of two research reports into the state of volunteering in Australia.

The two reports, Volunteering in Australia: The Volunteer Perspective and Volunteering in Australia: The Organisation Perspective, offer two different but equally valuable perspectives in the process to create a new national strategy on volunteering.

Progress on the national strategy now continues, with the draft on track for release next month ahead of the launch of the final strategy at next February’s National Volunteering Conference in Canberra.

See more: Volunteering gets blueprint for the future

What did the reports find?

The reports, based on surveys of individuals and organisations, confirm the decline being seen in volunteering around the country.

The research shows  most organisations are facing challenges recruiting volunteers. Eighty-three per cent of respondents said their organisation needs more volunteers immediately or in the near future, and 60 per cent expect to need more or significantly more in five years’ time.

At the same time, individuals facing financial difficulties are less likely to have recommenced volunteering since the onset of COVID-19.

The reports also  found the most common reason for not volunteering was work or family commitments with 40.8 per cent of respondents giving this reason. Just over 14 per cent said they didn’t volunteer because there were “no suitable opportunities”, and 13.9 per cent said they didn’t volunteer because “nobody asked”.

CEO of Volunteering Australia, Mark Pearce, told Pro Bono News that this last statistic was particularly fascinating.

Using this data, organisations could begin “matching motivation to mission” to engage volunteers more, he said.

Part of this might involve upskilling and better resourcing volunteer managers.

“When you don’t appropriately support, engage, train, maintain and provide enough resourcing for volunteer managers, then the outcomes are sub-optimal,” Pearce said.

“There needs to be a far greater resourcing of and realisation of the importance of volunteer management in terms of providing better outcomes for volunteers. “Communities will benefit when volunteer managers are better resourced, better acknowledged and better supported.”

The reports also found that volunteering had been in decline since well before the pandemic hit, with rates of formal volunteering dropping from around one-third to around one-quarter of adults since 2002. 

Rates of volunteering amongst those aged 15-24 increased slgihtly between 2006 and 2016, before plunging between 2016 and 2021.

People born in a non-English speaking country were more likely to have engaged in informal volunteering — that is, outside an organisation — than those born in Australia, as were females and older Australians.

In positive news, more people said they intended to increase their future volunteering than those who said they intended to reduce their volunteer hours — 29.1 per cent versus 20.1 per cent.

Data to lead the way

Australia’s first national strategy on volunteering since 2011 is also likely to be a world first, Pearce said.

“As far as we can tell… a national strategy for volunteering has never been constructed in this way before,” he said.

“The federal government has provided funding for it, [and] Volunteering Australia has led the development of the evidence and the development of the national strategy, but it’s been a process where we’ve brought the entire volunteering ecosystem along.”

Including the government in the process means it will be “on the hook” for part of the implementation, but the project remains one defined by the whole volunteering ecosystem — and the whole ecosystem will therefore be responsible for implementing it, Pearce said.

He understands that the process for rolling out a national strategy for volunteering in Australia won’t be a walk in the park. Fixing the decline in volunteering will take time, he said.

But the strategy will provide a ten-year pathway to guide the way, along with the data to back it up, he added.

The presence of hard data in the two reports had been a source of comfort and vindication for stakeholders, despite some of that data illustrating major challenges.

One of the challenges illustrated was a need for leadership at all levels of volunteering. Pearce said he doesn’t shy away from this fact.

“Some of the data has been confronting, some of the findings have been the sort of thing where you say, ‘well, OK, I felt that one in a real sense’, but we need that. We can’t go on the way we have with declining volunteer numbers and greater expectation around volunteer involvement, greater demand for volunteer involvement, without fundamental and substantial change.

“I’m optimistic that with data in place, with an entire volunteering ecosystem which has come together for the first time, I suspect, in living memory, to understand, address these issues and move forward collectively — I’m approaching that with a good sense of optimism,” Pearce said.