Behind the crowdsourcing platform: Assessing volunteer recruitment and engagement instruments

Involving volunteers to perform tasks through crowdsourcing projects is gaining popularity. However, attracting volunteers and keeping them engaged throughout a project sets great challenges to project managers. This article analyzes the effectiveness of recruiting and engagement instruments on volunteers’ activity. A mixed-method approach has been used, including interviews with project managers and quantitative data from a large Dutch crowdsourcing platform. The research results show that crowdsourcing projects benefit from being part of a platform because of the higher activity of experienced participants. The study also provides empirical evidence supporting the effectiveness of timely communication and the speed of quality checks, both of which require project management resources. Finally, the study suggests that material rewards are less important for volunteer engagement than the intrinsic motivation of a point-based reward system.