Rethinking nonprofit brands through a volunteer lens: time for B2V

Many nonprofit organisations (NPOs) deliver their services and mission through volunteers. Brand has been shown to be a powerful influence on the decision to volunteer. What was not known was the role brand plays in volunteer choice between NPOs. Understanding this enables NPOs to be more effective at attracting the volunteers they need, particularly given limited budgets. Using Framework Analysis with a large qualitative sample, this paper contributes to that gap in knowledge. The research identifies three constructs driving volunteer choice of NPOs, sources of Brand Knowledge, level of Brand Engagement, and the behavioural process of choice, labelled Brand Discovery. Through exploring the relationship between these constructs, the study points to significant implications for NPOs for volunteer recruitment, importance of brand presence, and competitive set. Summary statement of contribution. The study makes several contributions to theory and practice. It extends volunteer motivation theory to examine nonprofit brand choice. It builds on Symbolic Consumption Theory and Decision-Making Theory to define patterns of volunteer decision-making behaviour. It describes automatic, explicit, or considered decision-making despite high involvement behaviour. As a result, the research calls for a new perspective on nonprofit brands when seen through a volunteer lens, described as Business to Volunteer (B2V)

Using Call Data and Stigmergic Similarity to Assess the Integration of Syrian Refugees in Turkey

By absorbing more than 3.4 millions Syrians, Turkey has shown a remarkable resilience. But the host community hostility toward these newcomers is rising. Thus, the formulation of effective integration policies is needed. However, assessing the effectiveness of such policies demands tools able to measure the integration of refugees despite the complexity of such phenomena. In this work, we propose a set of metrics aimed at providing insights and assessing the integration of Syrians refugees, by analyzing the CDR dataset of the challenge. Specifically, we aim at assessing the integration of refugees, by exploiting the similarity between refugees and locals in terms of calling behavior and mobility, considering different spatial and temporal features. Together with the already known methods for data analysis, in this work we use a novel computational approach to analyze users' mobility: computational stigmergy, a bio-inspired scalar and temporal aggregation of samples. Computational stigmergy associates each sample to a virtual pheromone deposit (mark) defined in a multidimensional space and characterized by evaporation over time. Marks in spatiotemporal proximity are aggregated into functional structures called trail. The stigmergic trail summarizes the spatiotemporal dynamics in data and allows to compute the stigmergic similarity between them

Gains and losses: African Australian women and higher education

This article argues that African women migrants in Australia are increasingly enrolling in and successfully completing tertiary study, usually at high emotional and financial cost. While this qualitative study has shown that both refugee-background and non-refugee African Australian women's enrolment in higher education is enabling new forms of participation and belonging in resettlement, it continues to challenge the women's more traditional cultural roles and identities. This article argues that these gendered negotiations are noted only cursorily (if at all) within education and health contexts, and, importantly, form a primary obstacle facing African Australian women in migration and refugee resettlement transition