Despite the more selfish culture promoted during the Trump era, volunteerism remains strong within many communities in the U.S. and there are signs that the inclination towards helping others is increasing.
This is apparent in a recent study from Zapier that finds that 151.4 million U.S. citizens plan to volunteer during 2022.Moreover, nearly half of those planning to engage in these activities aim to volunteer in person.
But while in-person volunteering in 2022 is expected to return to 2019 levels (following years of decline across the 2010s), the study found that most volunteers are less inclined to volunteer if a non-profit has poor technology solutions.
Looking into these data further, the trends show that 76 percent of volunteers report facing issues when volunteering for non-profits and 148.8 million U.S. citizens said they would be more likely to volunteer if non-profit organizations had technological tools to minimize tedious work tasks.
The top four reasons why Gen Z and Millenials are less inclined to volunteer were found to be: Lack of communication, in general; plus, perceived poor communications directly from the organization. The other reasons were identified as: Scheduling trouble, spending time on repetitive tasks, and spending time correcting human errors.
The answer for these issues is related, to a degree, in the form of better and more accessible technology solutions. With better and more accessible tech solutions, many of the challenges facing non-profits and volunteers could be decreased.
The effect of this could be to encourage more people to give their time to charitable organizations.
As an example of what could be done, the Georgia Innocence Project (an independent organization dedicated to helping individuals who have been convicted of crimes they did not commit) has been using no-code automation for over five years.
According to Operations Director Matt Holbrook, in a message passed on to Digital Journal: “As a non-profit, we always have to try and do more with less, which means that we are constantly running up against constraints of time and resources.”
The organization has used technology to process and track 270 open records requests over ~2 years. In addition, the charity has received and tracked some 5,360 phone calls over 4.5 years as well as recording 10,591.6 hours of volunteer time over 3 years.
