Full-Time Volunteering in the Nonprofit Sector: An Empirical Study from the Education Sector in India

In this chapter, we delve into the critical challenge of attracting and retaining a dedicated full-time volunteer workforce for a long-term commitment. We focus on Teach for India (TFI), a nonprofit organization operating in the education sector within India. By analyzing TFI’s recruiting process, we gain insights into the obstacles that hinder effective full-time volunteer recruitment. Our descriptive results show that the matriculation rate lowers as age, employment, and human capital increase and is higher for humanities than engineering graduates. We also observe a strong association between recruiting events and matriculation rates. Finally, we observe that gender has no impact on the matriculation rate. We also perform an observational study by creating two similar treatment and control groups based on event attendance and observed covariates. We conclude that attending an event motivates the candidate to matriculate to the fellowship.