Students help Red Cross with volunteer shortages

Recruitment or Retention?  A Qualitative Marketing Research Study Investigating the Shortage of Disaster Action Team Volunteers for the Red Cross in Maricopa County

Honors student Elizabeth Greeno, along with Thesis Director Cheryl Jarvis and 2nd Reader Dr. Tony Peloso, worked with the Red Cross in Maricopa County to investigate its reported shortage of Disaster Action Team (DAT) volunteers. One of the biggest volunteer programs run by the Red Cross, the DAT is part of their Emergency Disaster Response program, and focuses on meeting people’s immediate emergency disaster-caused needs.  When a disaster occurs, the DAT provides shelter, food, damage assessment, media relations, health, and mental services to those who have been affected with the goal of helping the families and individuals affected by an emergency get back to their normal daily lives as quickly as possible.  DAT members also feed emergency workers, handle inquiries from concerned family members outside the disaster area, provide blood and blood products to disaster victims, and find any resources available for affected people.  The Red Cross of Maricopa County had been struggling to determine why it was suffering continued shortages in its DAT volunteers, and was unsure whether the failures lay in recruitment, retention, or some other area. The final goal of Elizabeth’s thesis was to identify the cause or causes of the volunteer shortage and offer recommendations to alleviate the problems causing the shortage.

Elizabeth started with qualitative research, conducting depth interviews with Red Cross Staff and DAT volunteers. She also analyzed and integrated quantitative research in the form of a telephone survey of past and current DAT and other types of Red Cross volunteers that the organization had already collected. From this data, she was able to develop a service blueprint for the volunteer process at the Red Cross, and identified that the problems causing DAT volunteer shortages lay not in recruitment or retention, but rather in failure of communication during training of the volunteers at several levels, from when the volunteer first seeks an opportunity to participate to when they earn the highest level of training on a Disaster Action Team. The service blueprint pinpointed five critical points at which communication with trainees was breaking down, and at which potential volunteers were leaving the system before becoming fully committed to the program. Elizabeth was able to develop concrete tactical recommendations intended to fill the communication gaps that exist in the current volunteer training program.