Understanding volunteers' motivations

Volunteers are an important human resource for many organizations. Reasons to volunteers are attributed to factors such as the increasing number of nonprofit organizations, decreasing pool of volunteers, competition for volunteer recruitment among organizations, and problems in volunteers' retention to an organization. Groups of college students from six departments were stratified according to service oriented and non-service oriented majors. For this study, a two-part questionnaire, including the six scale of the Volunteer Inventory Functions (VFI) was administered to college students. The results showed differences between volunteers and non-volunteers, males and females, and service-oriented and non-service oriented majors in their motivations to volunteer.