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by jonah 1307 days ago
Some thoughts in the few minutes I have at the moment. From my past 5 years being involved with a specialized volunteer group:

* Ensure that your volunteers can see direct positive results of their work. (Throwing your effort into a black hole sucks, even if it is having a positive effect somewhere.)

* Ensure your volunteers are receiving personal growth/learning from their involvement.

* Give people responsibility & ownership of areas or tasks.

* Let go of people who aren't showing up to make room for new folks who (hopefully) will.

* Attrition is a thing. Streamline your training and onboarding and keep the flow of new people coming in.
1 comments
jhogendorn 1306 days ago
Great points, my thoughts:

  * Direct positive results, absolutely yes. The problem I've found here is that if you are 95% good at this, you are still failing and someone is very upset they got missed/jilted, and you're none the wiser until they take some action based on that.
  * Our environment we pitch as 'volunteering is a great way to pick up new skills'. Do you think theres value in 'gamification' ie, issuing badges or collectable somethings to indicate skills gained? We cant officially certify you as a book-keeper but we can teach you how to operate xero for example. Useful as kudos, maybe marginally as a resume padder.
  * We do a lot of this, it works okay-ish. It's hard to get 'full compliance', ie you give a volunteer ownership of an area, theres fun parts and not fun parts and weirdly enough the not fun parts get missed every month...
  * Historically we've been terrible at letting go but we are getting better and better. The geek social fallacies are very very strong.
  * This last point feels like going to the dentist. I know i need to floss more <insert excuse>. You're 100% right though, hyperfocusing on the onboarding and training should probably be one of our highest priorities because its making every other fire downstream bigger.
Are you able to provide examples of how you've done these points in your organisation from an implementation perspective?
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