"I'll be there": What motivates online volunteers to continue their service?

This study aims to understand the process of online volunteer retention from the perspective of volunteers. Retention of volunteers is an issue that many non-profit organizations strive to achieve (Finkelstein, 2008). Understanding the retention process requires a separate investigation from understanding the recruitment process since the reasons volunteers choose not to quit are different from the general motives for initial volunteering (Willems et al., 2012). Also, online forums – where the expert volunteers form a flexible and far-reaching knowledge network (Liu et al., 2016) – demand a different approach than offline settings. One study on Wikipedia found that the volunteer editors experienced particular challenges more saliently than offline volunteers with similar tasks (Konieczny, 2018). Thus, this study examines why three online volunteers for a non-profit organization continued their service for more than ten years despite various challenges.