Week 3 Assignment 2 Blog post

I don't know how many of us struggled with this weeks assignment to find a reliable source for our research topics, but I found this to be a bit time consuming. In case you forgot my research topic is "What Motivates A Volunteer Work Force" or "Volunteer Motivation." This topic is very important to me since I hope to work in nonprofits in the future and in my past experiences working as an event coordinator and fundraiser in a nonprofit I struggled with this very thing.

I was all excited when I started my search to use the "and" search techniques we have all read about in our textbook. I was ready to narrow down my search field with this technique in order to find the perfect sources for my topic. I discovered quickly that with such a narrow search field I could not find a single search. So I had to back up and broaden my search 3 different times in order to find sources that would work and were credible. I guess my topic my be so narrow that I will not find a book on just this specific topic, but I was able to find many sources with this topic as a chapter in the book.

The source I did choose was on managing nonprofit risks and had a section on volunteer risks. Now this may not sound like it is about volunteer motivators, but when I read the chapter on how to avoid risks working with volunteers I found that it was a valuable source. By avoiding the risks described in this book I was learning techniques that were actually motivators for volunteers. I guess what I learned is that I needed to read this even though it didn't come right out and say these are motivators for volunteers. I had to discover this for myself and use information that I gathered from this source and use it to my advantage in a new way.

As I continue looking for information on my topic I am going to try and be more open minded to where my information is coming from. Just because a result of a search doesn't fit exactly into my box of what is relevant doesn't mean it can't be a valuable source of information for me to learn from.