COVID-19 and its Impact on Volunteering: Moving Towards Virtual Volunteering

12/04/2021

Date of Publication:  July 2020

Authors:                     Erik L. Lachance, University of Ottawa, Canada

Published by:             Leisure Sciences

Given COVID-19 social distancing measures, the traditional form of in-person volunteering is threatened. Virtual Volunteering (VV) is another way to volunteer.  VV is more popular among youth in their 20s and 30s, people who are have post-secondary degrees, and unemployed people.  There are a number of advantages with VV; for example, many individuals who are not able to volunteer in person due to geographical restrictions, family, work, or social distancing requirements can now do so. 

Despite these advantages, there are three major challenges in management processes: recruitment, engagement, and retention. 

  1. Organisations have yet to take advantage of VV as few have created roles specific for this volunteer type. Further, companies have reported using other strategies (e.g., in-person interviews) as opposed to technology to recruit volunteers.
  2. Organisations face challenges communicating with VV; for example, individuals taking prolonged periods of time to provide responses on task progress while others even leave their role without notice. While this is also be possible in traditional volunteering, VV adds an additional barrier (i.e., technology).
  3. VV retention is problematic. Compared with traditional volunteers, virtual volunteers are more difficult to retain as their tasks are primarily project-based and short-term in nature.

Especially during COVID-19, VV is more relevant than ever.  Although there are challenges to using VV, the article points out ways to deal with these challenges. For example, regarding recruitment, many organisations are yet to recruit using VV.  In the future, they could provide information about positions or advertise on social media platforms to recruit youth for VV. VV enables organisations to maintain operations while respecting imposed social distancing measures. It represents the future of volunteering which is ripe for inquiry and implementation during Covid and beyond.

The full report is available here.