Online crowdfunding has emerged as a powerful tool to raise funds for emergency response. Crowdfunding campaigns can use two transparency tools to attract donors: updates and certification. Updates are additional messages that the organizer issues after launching the campaign and are a form of operational transparency when they communicate the campaign’s work to donors. Alternatively, certification is a form of conventional transparency that ensures the campaign truly benefits a charitable purpose. Using an econometric analysis, we investigate the effects of transparency on donations. We study the direction of causality and mechanisms behind work‐related updates by conducting an experiment. Results from the econometric analysis using over 100,000 campaigns benefiting victims of emergencies reveal that both updates and certification have positive effects on donations. Each additional work‐related word in an update (operational transparency) increases donations on average by $65 per month, while certification (conventional transparency) raises funds on average by $22 per month. Results from the experiment confirm the direction of causality; posting work‐related updates in crowdfunding campaigns increases donations. Two mechanisms explain this effect: donors’ enhanced perceptions of effort and perceptions of trust.

We study volunteer management at a charity storehouse operated by a large faith‐based organization. The storehouse runs entirely on volunteer efforts. We investigate the role of volunteer experience and storehouse congestion in the preparation of orders using a multi‐method approach. First, we conduct a field study to explore these relationships and collect data at the level of volunteers’ teams. These teams can pair volunteers with either different levels of experience (mixed pairing) or equal levels of experience (no‐mixed pairing). Second, we estimate the effects of volunteer experience and storehouse congestion on the order processing times empirically. Third, we build a simulation model to study how operational decisions—volunteers’ pairing in teams and whether to allow or impede storehouse congestion—affect two performance metrics: on‐time order preparation rate and additional time to prepare the orders, in steady conditions. Then, we simulate disaster conditions at the storehouse, that is, simultaneous surges in supply of volunteers and demand of orders. Contrary to extant literature on team collaboration, we find that no‐mixed pairing outperforms mixed pairing under disaster conditions with storehouse congestion. In fact, no‐mixed pairing improves the on‐time order preparation by 4.32% and the additional time to prepare the orders by 14.42% compared to mixed pairing. Moreover, under disaster conditions, a “controlled congestion” policy at the storehouse delivers the best performance metrics.

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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 data set from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team Tasking Manager. Our data set 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.