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?
Volunteer Form
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.
Task Board & Role Definitions
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.
Task Tracking & Triage
@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.