Understanding Managerial Perspectives of Volunteering at Nonprofit Leisure Events: A Comparison of Typologies Within Open Gardens Australia

Nonprofit volunteer motivations have been widely researched and discussed as the sector is volunteer-dependent. For nonprofit, community-based events, volunteers frequently fulfill multiple roles, yet motivations across roles are infrequently studied. This study explores managers’ views of volunteers across roles for Open Gardens Australia and whether existing typologies for leisure motivations and generic volunteering can be used to classify volunteer motivations. Examining managers’ perceptions is important as managers deliver volunteer-driven events by designing strategies to attract and manage volunteers’ experiences. Results suggest that existing typologies do not adequately capture the motivations of volunteers for these events with additional motivations of significance for some roles being - Obligation, Inertia, Filling a Personal Void or Gap, Elitism and Competitiveness. Of the 14 motivations found, many overlap and more than half may be simultaneously altruistic and egoistic, suggesting complex interactions within and across the different motivations, although motivational differences across volunteer rolesare limited.