Selling volunteering or developing volunteers? Approaches to promoting sports volunteering

This paper considers the balance between promoting volunteering in sport by emphasising the personal rewards to prospective volunteers themselves – the dominant management approach – and promoting it by the long term development of the values of volunteering. We review the motivations and rewards of sports volunteers and how these can be used to promote volunteering as being a transaction between volunteer and organisation. This is contrasted with a life-course approach to understanding volunteering, and evidence that an understanding of the value of volunteering can be inculcated that underpins continued volunteering. The two approaches regard potential volunteers respectively as ‘consumers’ and as ‘citizens’. We suggest that a shift to treating volunteers as consumers can lead to volunteering being regarded as transactional. The discussion has implications for volunteering in general; in particular, how it can be promoted in a society where narratives of ‘the consumer’ increasingly dominate over those of ‘the citizen’.