Team And Volunteer Engagement – Increasing Participation Through A Team And Volunteer Engagement Plan

In recent years, Abiola Oke of the University of Nairobi, Kenya has done research into what teams and volunteer engagement can achieve when put together in a vegan organisation. It is widely accepted that animal welfare is one of the key drivers of community development and volunteering is a great way to make a difference. In communities where animals are abused for food or other purposes, the people who are usually targeted include children, women and the elderly. What Abiola Oke and others have found is that engaging a team of volunteers in a vegan organisation can help to increase team and volunteer engagement, as well as providing a valuable platform for groups who would otherwise be too disinterested to take part.

Nonprofit Organizations and Volunteer Engagement

Prior to running their research, Abiola Oke worked with a cross-section of donors from a range of donor communities, to understand what they wanted in order to ensure that their money was well spent. What she found was that many of the volunteers she spoke to did not fully appreciate the essential functions that their money was investing. In turn, these groups did not understand how essential these functions were to their cause, or why they were being asked to fund certain projects. This lack of understanding, in turn, did not contribute to the growth and success of the projects, and prevented them from being able to recognise the critical value that these projects provided to their local and global communities.

Abiola Oke has now set out to explore the role that team and volunteer engagement can play in increasing team and volunteer engagement. She has done this by investigating the work of organisations which use a combination of traditional and online methods to encourage volunteers to get involved; both those who are interested and those who are not. Through her research she has identified what features tend to work best to increase team and volunteer engagement, and what makes projects more likely to attract participants who are willing to take part and become involved. These features are then incorporated into a model designed to ensure that a team and volunteer engagement project is able to successfully raise its performance in key areas such as: raising its profile, engaging a wider range of participants, providing better feedback to those who are taking part, and increasing its return on investment.