People & Citizen Engagement
Volunteering

What Is This?

This is a tool for thinking about volunteers and engagement.

What Is Its Use?

The tool is used to make you think about why people should volunteer to join an engagement project.

Volunteering – Some Considerations

  • Is it something that matters to them?
  • What are they passionate about? Sometimes people don’t see the connections between topics. It might be useful to see if you can find common ground
  • Why should they bother?
  • How much time do they have?
  • Are they unaware of the range of engagement opportunities?
  • Formal kinds of engagement may be off-putting
  • Informal methods of engagement can still have a political impact (see table for example)

As this table suggests, roughly only one-in-two people perform any political action at all. See the Research Review (PDF, 451k) for more on this.

Reported political action, 1986-2000

% saying they had

1986

1989

1991

1994

2000

Signed a petition

34

41

53

39

42

Contacted their MP

11

15

17

14

16

Contacted radio, TV or newspaper

3

4

4

5

6

Gone on a protest or demonstration

6

8

9

9

10

Spoken to an influential person

1

3

5

3

4

Contacted a Government Department

3

3

4

3

4

Formed a group of like-minded people

2

3

2

3

2

Raised the issue in an organisation they already belonged to

5

4

5

4

5

None of these

56

48

37

53

47

Base

1548

1516

1445

1137

2293

Source: Bromley et al 2001: 201 table 9.1

As you can see from the evidence above, only a small number of people are likely to get involved in such activities, possibly because they are unaware of the benefits of getting involved or the range of opportunities. In our project we found that it was really important to think about the benefits for the volunteers at the start of the project, which helped to get more people involved.