302. Why Do Volunteer Managers Adopt New...

Mark Hager shares his exciting research on technology adoption in volunteer management. This research was conducted in conjunction with CCVA and focused on CVAs and how they’ve changed or adopted technology during the pandemic.

Mark Hager has been leading the field in research on volunteer management and engagement for years. He has recently released an update on his original Volunteer Management Capacity Study and his new work on Technology Evolution in Volunteer Administration. He joins us to discuss what he learned in this new TEVA study, and what that might mean for the leaders of volunteers and the field of volunteer engagement. He shares how the research was originally designed before March 2020, but that the pandemic has offered a unique opportunity to study the adoption of technology in real time.

We talk about what his research has shown about leaders of volunteers and their use of technology compared with other studies of technology adoption - SPOILER - we’re willing to use it even if it isn’t all that intuitive or easy to use!

Technology Evolution in Volunteer Administration: ·  Public brief at https://cvacert.org/teva/ ·  Blog commentary at https://lodestar.asu.edu/blog/2021/08/how-nonprofits-engaged-volunteers-during-covid-shutdown   Volunteer Management Capacity Study: · Original 2003 public brief at http://webarchive.urban.org/publications/410963.html ·  New 2021 (2019 data) public brief at https://volunteeralive.org/volunteer_management_capacity.php ·  Summary reflection at https://d8evol.nmsdev2.com/article/july-2021/volunteer-management-capacity-study-update

For More:

For more info on research in the field of volunteer engagement, check out Season 2 of the Time + Talent Podcast, 202: The Hard Truth: Diversity & Inclusion from the Volunteer Perspective.

Guest Bio:

Mark A. Hager, Ph.D.Associate Professor of Nonprofit Leadership and ManagementArizona State University

Mark A. Hager, Ph.D., is associate professor of nonprofit leadership and management at Arizona State University. He is principal investigator of the Volunteer Management Capacity (VMC) II Study and the Technology Evolution in Volunteer Administration Study, both of which officially wrapped in Fall 2021. Both of these projects were funded by AmeriCorps (a U.S. federal government agency), and Hager is hard at work to communicate results from both studies.

Hager joined the faculty at ASU in 2008, where he helps anchor the graduate program in nonprofit studies. Before moving to Phoenix, he was a senior research associate in the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute, a Washington D.C. think tank, where the first round of the VMC study was conducted. His research includes studies of the scope, dimensions, administration, and financial operations of and reporting by nonprofit organizations.