Meta topic incoming!
Help me brainstorm some ideas to market our volunteer opportunities to the public. I’ve heard from a couple folks recently that they have the skills, they have the drive, but they’re not quite sure how to help, or if they’d be welcome to come and join.
What sort of help do we need, and how could we get the word out there?
I’ve chatted with some folks with experience in this realm — a common theme is some clearly-defined rungs for volunteers to climb.
What are some easy things we can ask people to do with no risk or low-risk? What are the next things we can ask people to do once they’re comfortable with those?
Perhaps a form to fill out that asks them what skills they’re looking to contribute, or learn. That goes over some basic conduct guidelines. This can help folks feel a sense of arrival and confidence that they’ve been given explicit permission to be part of the team.
I made a Kanban board on our repo, and expanded this post asking for help with copywriting:
More of these well-defined roles with clearly-communicated guidelines are most of the battle. Though it will take some work to truly operationalize what we’re doing here down to the level of tasks we can assign to people.
@3mma had said “one task per week” is a reasonable goal to have for active volunteers. Maybe we could have some kind of task tracking system, where we could see who is most active vs. least active — figure out where to focus our energy as organizers to support the people who need it?
Does anyone know a good method for this? Ideally something that fits into a spreadsheet or table? I imagine some way to sort folks based on how recently they’ve contributed; how independently they can work; so we can identify who to reach out to, and give the support they need to feel empowered.
I accidentally made a post kind of similar to this so I’m just lodging this under this discussion.
People want to do things to support us, and we need things to be done in order for Unsprawling to continue to thrive and reach its full potential - content creation, admin and marketing support, tech + back-end support, nonprofit incorporation, etc.
How do we ensure this happens while staying flexible with the degree to which people want to and are able to engage? How do we recruit members, retain them, and keep them active + excited?
What do members want from us?
(mostly currently sourced from @biz & @3mma)
Creating a stronger onboarding system w/ clearer expectations, structure, + training for different roles. Increasing access to guidelines and reducing barriers to their participation:
Please add to the conversation + expand ideas! And let us know if you’d like to help.
Figuring out some volunteer/membership mgmt workflow is definitely pretty essential. We could do it by manually entering info into a spreadsheet. Automatic is better but manual isn’t so bad.
Probably just a handful of columns. Something that would allow us to keep track of volunteer’s skills/favourite tasks, last-completed tasks, and when that task was completed.
Discourse can do task management, but it’s pretty hacky and not very reliable. The repo is a lot better at it. We could start something manual in the Tables app for now, and research if there’s any way to make it integrate with Deck more automatically.
Deck integrates with Calendar already, which is suuuper sweet. I will probably move all my calendar stuff over there.
Orientation system makes a lot of sense to me. Would be great for new members to get a brief rundown on the different types of things they can do to help.
We’d definitely need to get our processes more streamlined and communicated before we’d be able to.
I have some documentation out there — it should live in Documentation under the unsprawling tag. Happy to take suggestions for priority guides