More Data About Volunteers

Continuing our discussion from earlier this week about volunteers, I thought it would be interested to have a look at where Americans are spending their time helping out. In this case, volunteering mirrors charitable donations with religious groups getting the largest percentage of volunteers (35.6%). Americans reported spending the least amount of their volunteer activities assisting with sports and arts groups (3.5%).

Drilling down to the city level (looking at 27 cities included in our Metro Market Study), we find the following for the years 2007-2009:

• 7.3% of volunteers in DC spent their time assisting Civic charities whereas only 3.1% help with these types of groups in Orlando.
• Educational charities are a bigger focus of volunteer efforts in L.A. (32.5%) than Orlando (22.1%).
• 6.1% of volunteers help out in Hospitals in Houston as compared to 15% in Nashville.
• Orlando’s residents (46.8%) are very focused on helping Religious causes, while San Francisco’s (24.6%) spend less time assisting in this area.
• San Diego has the highest percentage of volunteers helping with Social Service charities (17.1%) and Tampa has the least (9.4%).
• Sports/Arts causes see the highest percentage of assistance in San Francisco (5.2%) and the lowest in Cleveland (1.5%).

Of course, just like with our Metro Market Study, the types of nonprofits in the area have a big influence on the data.

Finally, here are the results of our poll that we created earlier this week to find out where you volunteer.