Third sector service provision: Co-producing the Volunteer Environment Check (VEC-Report) via Citizen Science

Beschreibung

Sustained government austerity has resulted in welfare retrenchment and an increasing demand for service provision from the third sector, as public agencies are no longer able to provide them due to funding cuts. However, civil society organizations (CSOs) can only sustain service provision by employing large numbers of volunteers - essentially unpaid and oftentimes unqualified labor - to substitute or complement expensive service professionals ( McAllum 2018). Because of the growing dependence of western welfare on CSOs to provide services, many nonprofit organizations need to change and professionalize to succeed (Maier et al. 2016, Walk et al 2025).

However, with welfare provision continuing to shift from nation states and governments to CSOs and other (mostly private) actors, responsibilities and dependencies shift as well. High volunteer turnover and subsequent service shortages extend beyond CSOs, impacting the communities they serve. CSOs must manage their voluntary workforce professionally to retain enough active volunteers for continued service provision, as unsatisfied volunteers will leave the organization (Dury 2018; Kewes & Munsch 2019). Most practitioners employ simple satisfaction surveys reporting means, which is insufficient because volunteer satisfaction is multidimensional (Willems 2013) and managerial implications must be carefully assessed to avoid unintended negative consequences (Meyfroodt & Willems 2025).

To succeed, volunteer managers must learn: How their practices of volunteer management are perceived by volunteers for different dimensions. As scientists interested in public and Third sector management and governance, we need to learn: How to build reciprocal relationships with CSOs to enhance research and practice? Our contribution is thus three-fold, reporting on: 1) How we enable resource-starved CSOs responsible for service provision to fine-tune their managerial practices for success on a sound empirical basis. 2) Our insights from pilot-testing a reciprocal Citizen Science (CS) approach within the Third sector. 3) How we set up a data pipeline providing continuous data for scientific research in the future.

To support CSOs in taking on these challenges we developed and pilot-tested a Citizen Science based approach (Vohland et al 2021; Turrini et al. 2018) to stimulate learning (Bela et al. 2016) and co-produce worthwhile managerial recommendations with volunteer managers in 15 Austrian CSOs. We developed and pilot-tested our replicable approach providing participating CSOs with survey-based quantitative benchmark reports (with a total of 729 usable responses) called the Volunteer Environment Check (VEC), which is generated semi-automatically utilizing Quarto. Participants analyzed and discussed their results with us and other participants during subsequent workshops and were invited to sign up for next year.

Zeitraum	10 Apr. 2026
Ereignistitel	International Research Conference for Public Management 2026: "Beyond Boundaries: Wellbeing, Innovation and the Future of Public Management"
Veranstaltungstyp	Konferenz
Ort	Perth, Joondalup, Australien, Western AustraliaAuf Karte anzeigen
Bekanntheitsgrad	International