I've spent the last decade in community organisations, open source software and similar pursuits where I'm working with or managing volunteers. I'm also audhd and people are very much not my strong suite. Not only am I trying to motivate and get good results from volunteers, I'm trying to work with a wide selection of humanity and lots of people similar to me with their own communication challenges and needs. I've learned a lot over the last decade but theres still a long way to go.<p>Some topics where we have found friction:<p>* What internally motivates volunteers, or how do you motivate them externally
* Keeping people happy, communication techniques
* How to organise large informal groups of people when capitalism isnt a factor
* Managing when things go not-quite-right or outright wrong
* Getting the boring, unsexy paperwork and compliance things done
* Breaking through bystander effect problems "Some other volunteer will do that"<p>A great example of a difficulty we have is when a group of volunteers has responsibilities and doesnt meet or do them. If you punish the volunteers (loss of funding, privileges etc) they just quit. Now you have no volunteers. What other techniques are there?<p>Open source, people usually are participating to scratch their own itch, they're internally motivated. Once they scratch the itch, they're gone. So what is the mindset of the core contributors, what makes them different?<p>What has been your biggest learnings in this space?
Figure out why people show up. This may be homogenous across the group, but more likely there are two or three main categories.<p>Then, ensure you’re making space for them to get the thing they’re showing up for. Show a direct connection to how what they’re doing supports the outcome they’re trying to achieve. Show clearly that without them performing this task, the outcome they’re invested in will be compromised.<p>This game is all carrot, no stick. The only threat you have is that you might forbid them from continuing to counter their time, and that’s usually gated behind a pretty laborious process.<p>If someone’s primary reason is something like “I want to protect my community” then you can probably rely on them to keep their nose to the grindstone on less-fun tasks. If their driver is “I like having coffee with other other volunteers in between working” then they’re still an asset, but you probably need to hand them short simple tasks.<p>Expect attrition in the group and always ensure you’ve got new blood coming in. Be prepared for tasks to get dropped on the floor if someone gets busy or bored. If something absolutely must happen no matter what, that’s a job for a paid member of staff or it needs to be distributed amongst a large group with a sophisticated collaborative structure.<p>Source: volunteer firefighter that manages an equipment maintenance team and spends way too much of his time doing stuff because he loves it.
Some thoughts in the few minutes I have at the moment. From my past 5 years being involved with a specialized volunteer group:<p>* 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.)<p>* Ensure your volunteers are receiving personal growth/learning from their involvement.<p>* Give people responsibility & ownership of areas or tasks.<p>* Let go of people who aren't showing up to make room for new folks who (hopefully) will.<p>* Attrition is a thing. Streamline your training and onboarding and keep the flow of new people coming in.
Hot take: Nothing. I’ve never seen a group of volunteers not revolve into infighting and politics. Churches, local governments, soup kitchens - seen it all, every one of them is just brutal
In my experience, short tasks/projects that have a definite end work the best. Do <i>not</i> give volunteers projects that are mission critical with hard deadlines. If you must give volunteers on-going tasks, make sure to try and recruit enough volunteers that they can rotate between different jobs/tasks. Burnout is a killer on volunteer teams. And some level of politics and drama are inescapable—a volunteer coordinator can really help keep it to a minimum though.<p>The biggest motivator I’ve found is resume building. Match your volunteers to things they’re interested in trying out—including soft skills! Help coach your volunteers to find the right fit!<p>Recognition is another huge motivator. Newsletters, meetings, special awards, you name it.<p>Volunteers are <i>hard</i>. A good volunteer coordinator is worth their weight in gold!<p>If anyone has specific questions, I’m happy to answer.<p>(I helped run an all volunteer charity for about a decade)
Some really good responses here.<p>I found new volunteers left soon after they failed their own expectations of what they thought they would achieve. I warned them about this and asked them to start off with very small tasks and see how they go.<p>This is apart from being put off by those difficult volunteers who do most of the work but want to run every aspect.<p>And although you can't 'sack' a volunteer, you can 'succession management' them.
Accross most of the volunteer work I've done (which has definitely had the challenges you mention) usually personally as a longer term or more "senior" member of the teams, I've observed most of the work gets done by people who have a sense of personal responsibility or ownership for the task.<p>Some people are naturally more pro-active and feel more personally entitled to basically take the power to run with doing the task without needing approval from others. I feel like this is part personality, part skill but critically also partly related to the culture/environment of the team.<p>I've observed that fails when either people are not inclined that way (maybe more introverted people, people with a personality/habbit of not feeling such entitlement, etc), however also critically the culture of others shooting down their ideas or not giving them the freedom to work and learn for themselves can break it down.<p>This can be bad personality on behalf of those people - some people are just naturally like this and if one person is causing problems for your organisation as a whole, you may be well served by just blamelessly getting rid of them if they are causing what I can only describe as personal conflict regardless of if they are technically capable or even technically correct. Abrasive personalities that will drive others away won't serve the organisation as a whole.<p>But what I saw quite a bit was as these volunteer organisations got older and more senior and more experienced, the barrier of entry was now much higher (less freedom to make mistakes and learn because theres an expected quality) and those that had that experience often try to "help" with that knowledge but can have the effect on demotivating by constantly telling people why their ideas are bad or otherwise not empowering people with enough freedom to take that sense of personal responsibilty that will drive them to completion and run with it.<p>I've never worked in management in a work environment so have no experience to draw on with parallels for how that works in real jobs. But have seen that in a couple different other environments.<p>Another problem I've noticed is it's easy to commit to things in meetings which have scheduled times, but people struggle to find the personal time to follow up with the tasks and can easily forget the todo list, etc. Some level of todo management or having someone whose job it is to task, prioritise, remind/follow-up with people on a short term basis may be helpful for some. But I don't have a lot of experience in successfully doing that.