The Role of Volunteer Experience on Performance on Online Volunteering Platforms

37 Pages Posted: 17 Feb 2021 Last revised: 7 Jul 2022

See all articles by Gloria Urrea

Gloria Urrea

University of Colorado at Boulder - Leeds School of Business

Eunae Yoo

Indiana University - Kelley School of Business - Department of Operation & Decision Technologies

Date Written: July 6, 2022

Abstract

Online volunteering platforms allow humanitarian organizations (HOs) to recruit volunteers to work remotely on projects of varying urgency. While removing time and space constraints enables HOs to scale up their volunteer force, HOs must manage greater heterogeneity in volunteers’ experience. We investigate empirically how volunteers’ experience impacts two performance metrics on online volunteering platforms: project completion rate and volunteer retention. In addition, we examine the conditions under which experience becomes more relevant to project completion rate and retention. We collected a novel panel dataset from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team Tasking Manager. Our dataset includes 5,162 online volunteering projects with 2,169,683 contributions by 96,450 volunteers. Results from a panel regression model show that a project’s completion rate improves in diminishing increments with the experience of the contributing volunteers. We further find that the effect of experience on project completion rate is contingent on the urgency of the project. Regarding retention, results from a parametric hazard model indicate that volunteers are incentivized to return to an online volunteering platform more quickly when they are closer to attaining a new experience-based rank. However, we find that this effect weakens as volunteers gain experience. Overall, our study sheds light on volunteer management in an online context and offers operational insights on the recruitment and allocation of volunteers for HOs as well as online volunteering platforms.

Keywords: volunteer management, online volunteering platforms, volunteer experience, project completion, retention

Suggested Citation

Urrea, Gloria and Yoo, Eunae, The Role of Volunteer Experience on Performance on Online Volunteering Platforms (July 6, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3784152 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3784152

Gloria Urrea (Contact Author)

University of Colorado at Boulder - Leeds School of Business ( email )

Boulder, CO 80309-0419
United States

Eunae Yoo

Indiana University - Kelley School of Business - Department of Operation & Decision Technologies ( email )

1309 E. Tenth Street
Bloomington, IN 47401
United States

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