Dopp’s Guidelines for Managing Volunteers (Community Expression Blog Edition)

'High-Five' by Kevin, via Genderfork

As I built and grew a volunteer staff for Genderfork, a community expression blog, over a period of about six months, I worked out a set of informal guidelines for managing a staff.  Here are the pieces that were most critical for me.

1. Get to know them first, but not aggressively. I need a sense of a volunteer’s motivations, personality, relationship to the project, and social presence on the Internet before I will work with that person — but only on a very general level. If a person goes by a pseudonym, I don’t actually need a real name. I just need to know if and how the person behind that pseudonym earns respect online, and why they want to help.

2. Keep the critical task lists small. No one on my team has a required workload of more than two hours a week (most have less than that), even if someone asks for more. Volunteers can put in extra hours whenever they wish, and that’s up to them. I know life eventually gets busy, and I want everyone’s minimum commitment to be reasonable no matter what.

3. Let volunteers set their own schedules. Everyone should be able to batch-process a pile of work (do a bunch of it in advance) whenever it makes sense.  Whether a volunteer wants to work every day, once a week, or once a month should be flexible, and up to the individual.  (There are sometimes exceptions to this rule for us, but for the most part it’s possible.)

4. Make it concrete. All volunteers have concrete, realistic assignments paired with clear expectations.  They know when they’re done, and they have a way of assessing if the work they did was good.

5. Access granted on a need-to-break basis. Everyone gets enough access to do their jobs effectively, but not enough access to break the site.  (Tip: In WordPress, get a role/capability plugin for better control over account types.)

6. Interdependence works. I tie tasks to things other people care about — usually another volunteer’s job, or the public-facing content, or both. Volunteers need to know that when they don’t do their work, someone else will feel it.

7. No one owns the content pipelines. Volunteers get access to submissions and content in shared spaces.  I can check in and see how things are going at any time. If a volunteer stops working, we don’t lose any content.

8. Be extra clear about the few things that matter, and let go of the rest. I set a handful of clear guidelines based on what I feel is critical to the health of the project. I let the volunteers use their own editorial judgment, personality, and work style to get the job done within those guidelines. I don’t micromanage.

9. Expect them to be human. Volunteers are allowed to change. They’re allowed to flake before we even get started. They’re allowed to quit, to go quiet, to ask for help, and to need something different than I thought they needed, at any time.  It’s my job to support them, to be flexible with them, and to make sure their changing needs are unlikely to hurt the project.

10. Let them help each other. Our volunteers all have access to a private discussion list, and are encouraged to ask for the group’s input on content decisions when they want advice (instead of going to me for everything).

12. Praise loudly and often. Volunteers need recognition and appreciation — publicly, privately, in front of the rest of the staff, and from the community itself — in order to stay healthy and engaged.

13. Honor their insights, opinions, and ownership. Since they are in the most direct contact with our project, I also treat the volunteer staff as an advisory board for the direction of the site, and I get their input on any major changes or decisions before I make them.

In Other Words:

Volunteers are wonderful. Find the ones who really want to help. Give them clear, concrete ongoing tasks. Give them enough freedom to feel ownership, and enough guidelines to feel that their work is part of something bigger.  If something’s not working, it’s time to change something.

Remember to treat them like gold.