Around the world, voluntary programs are an increasingly prevalent regulatory instrument in governing nonprofit organizations. But accounts of mechanisms driving nonprofits’ participation in those programs are underdeveloped. This article combines and expands insights from voluntary regulation and institutional work theories to examine the impact of government’s informal relational work on nonprofits’ regulatory participation. Drawing on interviews and survey data from a random sample of 203 nonprofits in Shenzhen, China, the authors study the country’s pioneering government-sponsored voluntary accreditation program and its varying receptions among nonprofits. The empirical analysis shows that politically embedded nonprofits, those with closer organizational connections with the local government, are more likely to participate in accreditation. Since government agencies rely on existing regulatory networks to conduct relational work at both organizational and personal levels to persuade or cajole nonprofits to participate, they tend to direct their recruitment efforts towards more politically embedded nonprofits. However, these targeted recruitment practices may generate reactions much more complicated than the dichotomy of acceptance versus resistance, which ultimately facilitates some nonprofits seeking accreditation while deterring others.

Viewing platforms as a new kind of factory and playground, scholars have investigated how the platform economy transforms work and entertainment. As dominant platforms continue to encroach on new markets and sectors, including the non-profit sector, few have examined the ramifications when they serve as a plaza for civic action. Despite the civic orientation of these platform activities, platforms can reconfigure the charity event and mediate civic interaction through the permissive power they possess to extract surplus value from users’ online interactions invisibly. Drawing from the ethnographic fieldwork of the two non-governmental organizations (NGOs) participating in a crowdfunding event in China, I show how the platform company creates a competition-based civic event to mobilize thousands of NGOs to crowdfund on their social media platform. In particular, the platform induced NGO workers working for those organizations to mobilize their networks for fundraising. Performing relational labor to persuade friends, families and acquaintances to give donations as a job responsibility deviated from the norms of reciprocity, which incurred workers’ emotional, social and even financial costs. Invisibly, the platform extracts social capital from workers’ relational labor.