Professor of Behavioral Science
George Wu describes the difficulty social organizations have in getting volunteers to not only sign up, but also stick around - and the behavioral science research he’s doing to help combat these pitfalls.
George Wu investigates how to flip the volunteerism switch
Social organizations know that having an army of motivated volunteers is crucial in the battle against red ink.
But what motivates volunteers to enlist in a cause?
That question leads behavioral science professor George Wu to the intersection of economics and psychology, where he researches why people spend their resources the way they do. And to study why we don’t act—even when we want to or it’s in our best interests to act.
“The research suggests that organizations can get volunteers to come in and put a little bit of effort, but retaining them is difficult,” Wu, a member of the Social Enterprise Initiative’s faculty advisory board, said. “People express interest in sustaining their involvement, but for lots of reasons they don’t follow through. So, right now we’re looking at interventions that will help people participate more and obviously help organizations.”
Giving folks a nudge
It’s not just would-be volunteers who need some motivation to get going, Wu pointed out. He noted how his colleague Richard Thaler’s 2008 book Nudge showed that even when employees receive money to encourage saving through 401(k) plans, they don’t always take the bait. (Thaler is the Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at Chicago Booth.)
Wu and other researchers want to know what moves people to do something they already want to do—such as build a nest egg or volunteer with their favorite organization—which would help move the needle for social groups.
Nudge found that making participation automatic, so that one has to opt out in order to forgo a generally favorable result, is an effective way to boost participation. While that might work for subscriptions to email lists and for 401(k) sign-ups, some other kind of nudge is needed for promoting volunteering.
“There is a broader effort in the behavioral sciences to use psychology of various sorts as a way of intervening into situations to get people to do different kinds of things that they want to do anyway,” Wu said.
“We want to understand what people naturally do and understand the kind of common traps that prevent us from acting on our wishes.”
Helping people help social groups
To be effective, Wu noted, the nudges his research uncovers will have to be “simple and relatively easy to use, and they need to be used in lots of different kinds of situations.” That not only will help people, but will help those people benefit the organizations they care about.
“The motivations of people who are interested in social enterprise are different and broader and obviously not necessarily all financial in nature,” Wu said, noting that volunteers are motivated by altruism. “I’m interested in both the decision making of social enterprise as well as some of the kinds of things that contribute to the decision making, whether that be volunteerism or charitable giving”—two acts that help social organizations stay in the black.