Volunteers placing items in boxes.

Arizona volunteerism: today and in the future

Arizona Volunteerism: Today and in the Future

2016 Report

Throughout 2016, more than 900 Arizonans participated in-person or via electronic survey to provide their thoughts and ideas about volunteerism in Arizona. The Lodestar Center collaborated with the Arizona Governor’s Office for Service and Volunteerism to research and publish this report, which is being used to create the State Service Plan for Arizona.

  • View the full release of the "Arizona Volunteerism 2016: Today and in the Future" report here
  • View a summary of the "Arizona Volunteerism 2016: Today and in the Future" report  here.

 

2013 Report

Throughout 2013, more than 1,000 Arizonans participated in-person or via electronic survey to provide their thoughts and ideas about volunteerism in Arizona. The Lodestar Center collaborated with the Arizona Governor’s Office for Service and Volunteerism to research and publish this report, which was used to create the State Service Plan for Arizona. View the infographic on Arizona Volunteerism here. The study found that volunteerism continues to be an active force in addressing community needs, but participants also voiced concerns and identified issues, and a clear majority would like to see increased collaboration.

Arizona's volunteer Administrators and Advocates: perspectives, practices, and potential

In the fall of 2014, The Arizona Governor’s Commission on Service and Volunteerism and the ASU Lodestar Center for Philanthropy & Nonprofit Innovation collaborated to survey 185 volunteer administrators and advocates, defined as those whose primary role is coordinating and directing volunteers and/or promoting volunteerism. This research aims to discover how communities, organizations and government can best support Arizona’s volunteer administrators.

View the infographic on Arizona Volunteer Administrators here.

Arizona Giving and Volunteering Report

The 2010 Arizona Giving and Volunteering Report is a summary of data from a web-based survey of nearly 700 Arizona resident households conducted in the summer of 2009. The report offers detailed results of the charitable behavior of Arizona residents and also discloses specific charitable behaviors for Arizona’s Hispanic population.

The ASU Lodestar Center has published this report periodically since the first publication in 2002; the upcoming edition will be the fourth. Previous reports can be found below.

Arizona Giving and Volunteering Report: additional information on methodology, sample, and limitations methodology

The Arizona Giving and Volunteering data collection was conducted by O’Neil Associates for the ASU Lodestar Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Innovation (formerly the ASU Center for Nonprofit Leadership and Management). A computer-assisted telephone survey, using random digit dialing, was used to obtain a representative sample of 1,004 Arizona adults. The survey was conducted from May through June, 2002, and asked about the respondent’s household giving and individual volunteering in the previous twelve months. Therefore, the unit of analysis for giving is the household; all findings refer to household giving. For volunteering, the unit of analysis is the individual, as are the attitude and opinion findings.

This methodology approximates that of the bi-annual survey done by the Independent Sector. We can therefore make some meaningful comparisons between the statewide findings and the Independent Sector’s national findings, from Giving and Volunteering in the United States, Findings from a National Survey, 2001. However, some of the differences between the national and Arizona findings may be a result of different methodology as well as the data for the Independent Sector report being collected a year earlier.

The methodology used for the Arizona Giving and Volunteering report differs considerably from that used for the Giving USA report, published by the Center for Philanthropy at Indiana University and the AAFRC Trust for Philanthropy. The Giving USA report includes foundation and corporation giving, among other significant differences.

Sample Information

The findings are based on a random sample of 1,004 adults. For results based upon the entire sample, the confidence level is 95 percent, with a margin of error of +/-3.2 percentage points. This does not apply to those findings based upon a subset of the sample, such as the demographic analyses. Also, some estimates of charitable giving are included and they are noted within the text of the report.

Limitations

This research has the general strengths and limitations of random-sample survey research. Because the questions in this study asked respondents to recall and report their charitable giving and individual volunteering over the previous year, one limitation is accuracy of recall. Also, since the data are self-reported, the findings reflect individuals’ understanding of their own charitable giving and volunteering. As noted by Earl Babbie, “Surveys cannot measure social action; they can only collect self-reports of recalled past action or of prospective or hypothetical action.”1 It is not known the degree to which over-reporting due to the social desirability of the behavior in question affects the overall results. Nor is the effect of underreporting known, although it does appear to be present in a small percentage of the data.

Note: 1. Babbie, E. The Practice of Social Research. Belmont, CA: Thompson-Wadsworth, 2004.