Open Strategy and volunteering practices in NPOs

• In Event: Strategy in nonprofit organizations. Understandings of coherence, future sustainability, and voluntary work.

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to understand the contribution of volunteering practices to the strategy of nonprofit organizations. To do so, we inscribed ourselves in the perspective of practice as social accomplishment, which according to Rouleau (2022), focuses on understanding how and why things are done and inquires into "patterns of everyday actions emerging from relationships between practitioners" (p.165). Specifically, we identify the practices that contribute to the set of decisions and actions that lead to the fulfillment of the organization's purpose, sustained over time (Gaiardelli and Songini, 2021), under the premise that all organizations have strategy (Withington, et al., 2011).
The methodological design of this qualitative study was ethnography, since it describes, records, systematizes and analyzes social reality, based on regular and in-depth observation of sociocultural activities, social situations and objects of interest of a social group (Galeano, 2004). It had two methodological variations: (1) Multisite observation by considering attention in constant spatial and temporal movement (Angar, 2009), specifically in 4 nonprofit organizations in Colombia. And (2), It called for the participation of a volunteer ethnographer per organization (Mauksch et al., 2017), responding to the call of the importance of participatory research to understand the strategy (Vaara, et al., 2019), in which the conversation between researchers and practitioners achieve a better understanding of the occurrence of the phenomenon.
The results showed the existence of 3 volunteering practices: (1) Seeking Operational resource, (2) Sharing Experience, and (3) Guiding Others. These practices coincide in the 4 NPOs, even in the midst of diversity in terms of time of incorporation, decision-making structure, number of volunteers participating and territory of incidence of the organizations. These three practices transcend the operational understanding of volunteer action and give rise to an understanding of the contribution that volunteers make to the NPOs' strategy.
The delimitation of actions and praxis of these volunteer practices, allow establishing that the relationship of contribution to the strategy is through attributes of inclusion with incidence, generation and exchange of information with the establishment of facilitators for that purpose, and the delimitation of structure and purpose for decision making that project the organization.
The contribution of the study refers to the introduction of the practice perspective to the analysis of the volunteers' actions and the meaning they give to their practices. In doing so, it makes available a set of volunteer practices in relation to the strategy of nonprofit organizations, which has not yet been presented in the academic literature. As practical implications, it provides NPOs with a new way of reading the contributions that their volunteers make to the fulfillment of their missional purpose.

Author

• Lenis Yelin Araque, Fundación Huellas