Volunteer Retention Motives and Determinants across the Volunteer Lifecycle

ABSTRACT

The focus of the paper is on better understanding volunteer retention. A broad-based survey of fourteen Australian nonprofit organizations develops an expanded quantitative model of volunteer retention by adding two new antecedents: values-congruency and altruistic motives to previous modeling. The study generates a more comprehensive set of rankings of volunteer retention motives, with altruism receiving top ranking. Using exploratory factor analysis, the study develops a new three-item perspective of altruism, combining helping, service and the cause. A new four-phase framework of the volunteer lifecycle is also developed. Investigating changes in retention motives over the life cycle reveals a major and unexpected finding, that the altruistic motive may actually become more important as volunteers move through the lifecycle.

KEYWORDS:

• Volunteer lifecycle
• volunteer retention
• determinants of retention
• altruism
• nonprofit organizations

Acknowledgments

We appreciate the support and guidance of the Editor in giving us the opportunity to make further revisions to our paper’s length and to resubmit the revised manuscript by the deadline of 11 September 2019.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.