Volunteer management practices have been shown to have positive effects on employees in terms of skill development, job success, organizational identity, and morale in the public, nonprofit, and corporate sectors. Despite considerable research on volunteering, questions remain about how management practices of volunteer programs may affect volunteer performance. Leveraging data comparing self-enrolled and corporate-recruited volunteer mentors into a large-scale online program for entrepreneurs, this study measures the impact of institutional support on volunteer intensity, persistence, and quality. It also presents a novel way to measure volunteer quality through sentiment analysis to measure the tone of online messages, an emerging statistical technique. Findings suggest that a high level of institutional support leads to higher quality mentor engagement, compared to self-enrolled volunteers, while a low level of support leads to mentor quality much lower than self-enrolled volunteers.

在公共，非营利和公司部门的技能发展，工作成功，组织认同和士气方面，志愿管理实践已证明对员工产生积极影响。尽管在志愿工作方面进行了大量研究，但仍存在关于志愿人员计划的管理实践如何影响志愿人员绩效的问题。利用将自我注册和公司招募的志愿导师进行比较的数据，这些数据成为针对企业家的大型在线计划，这项研究衡量了机构支持对志愿人员强度，毅力和素质的影响。它还提出了一种通过情感分析来衡量志愿者质量的新颖方法，以衡量一种新兴的统计技术，即在线消息的语气。