Blogging w/ Volunteers: The Genderfork Jumpstart

Genderfork.com, a community expression blog about gender-nonconformity and androgyny, is one of my own projects. Here’s how it turned from a solo art blog into a community project. It was all about the volunteers.  – SD

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Before Volunteers: The Solo Year

Genderfork started as a solo project, and I wrote one rule in stone for myself on Day One:

This will not require more than two hours a month of my time.

If I chose to spend more than two hours a month, that was fine, but the bare minimum amount of work needed to keep the site consistent and stable would have to fit into that time slot. I could commit to two hours a month. If the project needed more than that from me, it was too likely to die.

For a year, I blogged a photo a day, and I kept my time commitment promise to myself by doing the work in batches. I would dig through Flickr once a month, find 30 photos, blog them all as “draft” posts, and then schedule them to appear one a day, every day, at 10am.  It took about two hours a month to maintain, and it was beautiful.

But when people started gathering around the site in larger numbers and asking for ways to connect with each other, “two hours a month” began to sound idiotic.  I started adding new ways to contribute and increased my time commitment to two hours a week. (“But that’s it!”)

That plan lasted, oh, about three days before I realized I was screwed.  Not only were the new contributions turning into a disorganized pile, but blogging photos was becoming much more time-consuming — I had found all the easy photos, and now I had to dig deeper. In order to go any further down this path, it was clear that I needed to ask for help.

(Sidenote: I should add right now that Genderfork has always been a money-free [or money-super-minimal] project, and that this simplified any ethical question around “paid vs. volunteer staff” for me considerably. We’ll talk more about that potential can of worms sometime. It’s an issue that needs a lot of careful thought.)

Volunteers: Phase One

On a whim, I put up a blog post explaining that I wanted to do more with the site, but that my time was too limited to handle all the work. Would anybody like to help? Three people I had never met or heard of before (Adisson, Erica, and Jakk) emailed me right away to ask what they could do.

I divided the photo blogging work between them (“please blog 10-12 photos each per month”), and made the requirements very concrete, basing them on everything I had learned from doing the work myself.  This meant I had to write out everything from our editorial guidelines, to how to set up the Flickr-to-Genderfork account connection, to how to avoid accidentally offending photographers.  It was a lot of writing, but it was worth it.

Communicating all of that to them and helping them get their first photos blogged took about a week or two. But once they got into it, they handled the responsibilities easily. Blogging photos was officially off my plate.

This freed me up to focus on the new content that was coming in: anonymous thoughts about gender, and reader profiles. I also started serving as an editor — responsible for reviewing, approving, and assigning publication dates to each photo as they came in from the volunteers.

It took me another month to get the submission management and blogging process worked out for the new Thoughts and the Profiles. But by that point, I had also figured out another system: figure out a new procedure, and then bring in a volunteer to take it over.

Volunteers: Phase Two

This realization marked a growth spurt in the volunteer staff.  I put up another post asking for more help, and a bunch of people emailed me to generously offer their time and energy.

Julian took over blogging the Thoughts. Helen started managing a Twitter feed of abridged content from the Thoughts submissions. Keeping our Thoughts submissions organized behind the scenes was becoming a task in itself, and a reader named Booda was more than happy to take it on.  And Kate started blogging the Profiles.

I actually received more volunteers than I knew what to do with in that round, but that “problem” sort of worked itself out. A few of them flaked once we started talking about actual responsibilities, which was fine.

One hopeful volunteer, who wished to be identified as “XylophoneGender,” was very eager to help and seemed smart and reliable. I was out of immediate needs but still riding the momentum of growth, so I started asking questions about what ze was interested in. It turned out that XylophoneGender was an active supporter of the gender-playful video scene at YouTube — something I hadn’t been able to get into because of my time limitations. I invented the role of Video Curator based what we’re already learned about other kinds of content, and let hir be in charge of finding new videos for us every week.  It worked out perfectly.

Volunteers: Phase Three

We stabilized for a couple of months, and then I started to see two issues:

1. Our readers wanted to recommend books, websites, and other relevant material to each other, and we were offering no good way for them to do that.
2. The editorial work of deciding what to publish each week was getting tedious and repetitive for me, and taking up more of my time than I wanted.

Enter Zory and Dana.

As I did for XylophoneGender, I created a new role for Zory based on what I knew about how we handled other kinds of content. Zory would be responsible for receiving and blogging Recommended Resources from the community.

And Dana was the only volunteer I actively sought out and made a special request for. She’s someone I had known for several years (the only one on the staff I knew before the project started, in fact) and she had a background in publications and management. I gave her the role of Managing Editor, and tasked her with laying out the content for each week and confirming that it all fit our editorial guidelines. This was a huge step for me. In order to give that job away, I had to entrust someone with enough power to break the site. I knew Dana would protect it.

With Dana in place, my two-hour-a-week job shifted to supporting the volunteers and guiding the community. All of the blog content (three posts a day!) was being managed 100% without me, but now we had new things to deal with: community politics, comment moderation, submission overload, general tech maintenance, and questions about growth.

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I’m going to stop the story before we get into Phase Four — Facebook, community questions, proofreading, special articles, Tumblr, an open community forum, and what happens when the organizer becomes the bottleneck for growth (again). Those are a whole other set of blog posts.

But I do hope this post laid out enough context for what I want to talk about next: my guidelines for training and managing volunteers. Coming very soon.