The annual economic value of formal volunteers in America is approximately $150 billion contributed by over 60 million volunteers at over 100,000 nonprofit organizations and 100,000 schools.
The word “volunteer” covers a wide spectrum of activities from assisting one-time at an event to being a dedicated weekly tutor to serving a multi-year commitment on a nonprofit board. Volunteer service can be totally voluntary, required for graduation or a scholarship, or even court-ordered. Regardless of these wide ranges of commitment and motivation, essentially all volunteers pass through the following three phases, for better or worse:
- Volunteer Connection
- Volunteer Management
- Volunteer Engagement:
All aspects of volunteerism have the potential for improvement. This organization and this site are focused upon utilizing data to increase and improve “Volunteer Connection” and thus is named “Volunteer Generation” where dictionary.com defines “generation” as a verb to be:
- to bring into existence; cause to be; produce.
- to create by a vital or natural process.
- to create and distribute vitally and profusely:
To date, there has been limited data about volunteers, the primary source being the “Volunteering in America” data from AmeriiCorps. There has been even less data about “Volunteer Connection” which occurs by word of mouth without specific technology and by over 300 community sites and a handful of national sites. The available data suggests that historically the vast majority of volunteer connections have occurred by word of mouth (primarily existing volunteers or trusted sources). Given the recent net loss of over 17 million formal volunteers and the increased expectations that you can now “find anything” on the internet, the importance of improving the digital sources for connecting volunteers to organizations has never been greater.