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

Description

Following their expansion and subsequent professionalization, Western welfare states are once again experiencing a change in the means of service delivery (Piatak, 2015). Non-profit organizations (NPOs) are under pressure to professionalize to meet the growing demand for services and requirements for funding (Maier et al. 2016; Walk et al. 2025). One highly relevant area in this regard is the professionalization of volunteer management, since volunteers are a unique organizational resource (Studer et al., 2016), enabling NPOs to sustain service provision during periods of austerity and welfare retrenchment. Since the early 2000s, public and non-profit volunteer managers in Austria have regularly met to share knowledge and practices for managing volunteers engaged in the (co-)production of human services. Over time, these expert exchange meetings have evolved into a national advocacy and education network dedicated to advancing and promoting professional volunteer management practices among member organizations.

However, scholars debate the benefits and drawbacks of professional managerial practices being introduced to NPOs (Terzieva et al. 2025). The development and dissemination of professional volunteer management practices inspired by managerialism in the Third sector is only worthwhile, if these efforts show a positive impact on the volunteers’ experience – especially volunteer satisfaction, being central to volunteer motivation and retention. Measuring the dissemination of practices on a national level is no easy endeavor, but for the Austrian case we utilize the network membership as a proxy for the adoption of professional managerial practices. We investigate:

If the level of volunteer satisfaction and the evaluation of employed managerial practices as perceived by volunteers differ significantly between network members compared to unaffiliated organizations?

By combining two datasets with partial organizational overlap, we can track the consequences of professional practice dissemination at the national, cross-organizational level, all the way down to the micro-level, by investigating volunteers’ satisfaction and their evaluation of the managerial practices employed. We report on the comparison of the perceived quality of volunteer management practices employed and volunteers’ satisfaction in member organizations, influenced by the network’s professionalization and dissemination efforts, compared to volunteers from unaffiliated organizations.

Based on our previous collaborations with the network (Fall-Winter 2024), we received an up-to-date list of all the member organizations and their self-reported levels of implementation of professional volunteer management practices disseminated inside the network. This serves as a proxy to identify the dissemination of professional volunteer management practices in Austrian NPOs. In a separate survey (Summer 2025), which investigated volunteers' perceptions (n = 549) in service providing NPOs, focusing on their evaluations of the employed managerial practices and their satisfaction. The resulting dataset includes both network member organizations (n = 8) as well as unaffiliated organizations (n = 17). This enables us to compare the levels of volunteer satisfaction and managerial practice evaluation between the two groups and allows for conclusions on the impact of professional volunteer management practices on volunteer satisfaction.

Period	9 Apr 2026
Event title	International Research Conference for Public Management 2026: "Beyond Boundaries: Wellbeing, Innovation and the Future of Public Management"
Event type	Conference
Location	Perth, Joondalup, Australia, Western AustraliaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International