Abstract
Although volunteers are a critical resource for non-profit organizations, little is known about how best to motivate them to work. A non-profit organization asked episodic volunteers to produce handmade greeting cards to sell at a fundraising event. By running a natural field experiment, we study the effect of motivating these volunteers through (a) the opportunity to vote on how the money that was raised would be spent and (b) the prospect of individual performance feedback. We find an economically and statistically significant positive effect of both tools on the quantity of work done, while the quality is mostly unaffected. Moreover, we observe significant gender differences in responsiveness to the treatments. While the prospect for feedback is more motivating to men, women respond more strongly to the opportunity to decide how the money would be spent. Empowerment seems to be a simple way to increase engagement for people with low enjoyment.
Highlights
Each year, millions of volunteers devote billions of hours to helping others.1 While their motives for donating their time having been extensively studied,2 the question of how to motivate them has not
By running a natural field experiment, we study the effect of motivating these volunteers through (a) the opportunity to vote on how the money that was raised would be spent and (b) the prospect of individual performance feedback
It is important for researchers and non-profit managers to understand under what conditions volunteers increase their efforts in coping with the tasks that are allocated to them, especially in those increasingly-common settings where, on some single occasion for some short-term project, managers need to motivate large numbers of unpaid workers whom they do not know personally and who differ greatly in their motives, skills, and commitment towards the organization’s mission. In such settings where financial incentives do not apply and only the conditions can raise or lower volunteers’ intrinsic motivation, we study the causal effects of (a) the opportunity to vote on what the money raised will be spent on and (b) the prospect of individual performance feedback on volunteers’ quantity of work
Summary
Millions of volunteers devote billions of hours to helping others. While their motives for donating their time having been extensively studied, the question of how to motivate them has not. It is important for researchers and non-profit managers to understand under what conditions volunteers increase their efforts in coping with the tasks that are allocated to them, especially in those increasingly-common settings where, on some single occasion for some short-term project, managers need to motivate large numbers of unpaid workers whom they do not know personally and who differ greatly in their motives, skills, and commitment towards the organization’s mission In such settings where financial incentives do not apply and only the conditions can raise or lower volunteers’ intrinsic motivation, we study the causal effects of (a) the opportunity to vote on what the money raised will be spent on and (b) the prospect of individual performance feedback on volunteers’ quantity of work. These findings support the idea that in the absence of monetary incentives, simple cost-effective tools—easy to adapt for diverse individuals—can be designed to boost the performance of volunteers
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