How things get done in online communities. Working with volunteers

1. Designing activities: Be persuasive when inviting users to participate in initiatives you have designed
2. Help users to connect and form groups based on the shared interests
3. Find leaders among the users and help them with the initiatives they propose

As soon as a group of regular users has formed in your community and there is a stable influx of new users to the platform, you need to start working with volunteers.

The main driving force of any community is volunteers. Volunteers are people who care about the mission of the community and the community itself and have the time and energy to help you grow it.

The primary value that volunteers get from online communities extends beyond the physical world. Those values are an opportunity for self-improvement, decision-making autonomy, a sense of belonging, access to interesting people, etc. To start participating in your community, volunteers need to find the community more valuable or more unique than others.

Working with volunteers comes down to finding such activities that allow the users to satisfy their mental needs and at the same time benefit the community. There are three primary ways to look for the activities and engage volunteers in them. You can try the approaches one by one or all three at the same time. They are not conflicting and complement each other.

Design activities yourself and convince users to participate.
Help users to connect and form groups based on the shared interests.
Find leaders among the users and help them with the initiatives they propose.

1. Designing activities: Be persuasive when inviting users to participate in initiatives you have designed

The success of your community largely depends on how socially active the users are.

Often there are enough people who potentially are ready to help you with the community, but somehow they are idle. They may not know that help is needed, doubt the success of initiatives, lack motivation, or something else. Your task is to enable people, make them enthusiastic and convince them to take an active part in one of the suggested initiatives.

Volunteers need to know what help the community needs and how they can contribute

It is critical that your platform has easy-to-use tools that allow one to find the work the community needs and track its progress. One approach is to have a list of work needed currently. The list can be generated automatically or maintained by someone.

Goal, feedback and public benefits of an initiative are a sufficient minimum to activate users

Goal-based initiatives that provide users clear feedback on the work they and its quality combined with a socially useful end result are sufficient for most initiatives to get users to participate.

There are a number of other motivators that are not in themselves the purpose of participation on the site as such, but they certainly make an additional positive contribution to stimulating user activities. For example: reputation points, public gratitude, extended privileges in the community, swag, etc. When thinking through your initiatives, focus on the essentials, setting all the auxiliary motivations aside.

Users must see the personal value in an initiative and feel that its end result is valued by general public

A required condition to make volunteers engaged in anything is that they should clearly see that their contribution is valued by those they help, as well as by the community at large. If you want to engage users in a collaborative activity, the outcome of the initiative must be valued by everyone involved, including those who get the value from the end result and those who participate in the activity.

Explain the reasoning behind your requests when reaching out to regular users

Regular users do care about the end results. They will personally assess the initiatives you propose. When you want to engage regular users, arguments and rationalization are a necessary part of communication.

When reaching out to casual visitors, rely on heuristics

Casual visitors do not tend to do in-depth analysis of the proposed initiatives. When you want to reach these users, your communication should be as simple and short as possible. Reasons and rationale in this case do not cause a better response. Moreover, they sometimes cause users to perceive the arguments as hidden manipulation.

Additionally to the when you talk to casual users, use simple and short requests when communicating initiatives related to:

Something that the users do not have a strong personal view about.
Something that assumes a small contribution.

Make the work of volunteers visible to the other users

When you want to persuade users to participate in an initiative, you can use the social proof heuristic. To do this, make sure that users see that there are other users who take some actions you are asking for in the initiative. Highlight the most active users who are participating in initiatives in digests, interview them about their personal experiences, share progress metrics with the community, etc. The fact that some users are participating gives the others confidence that the proposed initiative has a chance to succeed and encourages the desire to join themselves.

Ask specific people for specific help

To make your requests more effective:

Ask for help with specific well defined tasks.
Ask specific users for help. The smaller the group of people to whom the requests are addressed, the higher the likelihood that people will respond to the requests.
When asking for help, create a logical connection between the success of an initiative and something that the target users value.
Ask for help from those users who are interested in the tasks you are suggesting to work on and have all the necessary skills to complete it.

Fear and hate are the strongest activators

Fears and hate are very strong emotions. They should be used in exceptional cases. If you feel that it is the case, try to find topics that are based on the users’ desire either to avoid a future that scares them or change the present reality that they do not like much. Initiatives proposing work on such topics are effective in activating users and are compelling in their own right.

Other advice

Strive for initiatives to tap into users’ intrinsic motivation. The primary internal motivators: a sense of autonomy, a sense of competence, a desire for self-improvement, curiosity and the ability to share results with other people.
Do not use external incentives for activities that are interesting to users in themselves. External incentives undermine the internal interest in an activity for both those who receive the incentive and those who observe someone receiving it.
Create and maintain a culture of positive feedback to users’ actions on the platform. Feedback should be honest and given by real people for specific actions.
Strive for a good attitude of users towards the community. The better the users’ attitude towards the community, the more active they are. Anything that makes users like the community more increases their desire to help.
Maintain trusting relationships with the users. Users are more likely to help those they trust, value and have positive regard for.
Highlight the uniqueness of each user’s contribution. Users are more active if they believe that only they can help in a particular situation.
Divide large groups into small sub-groups. In small groups users are more active. One reason is that each user’s contribution is more visible. This allows users to believe that their personal contributions have a tangible impact on the overall goal of the group.
Design initiatives that assume social contact between users. Socialization and group activities create additional positive emotions and receive a greater response among the users.

2. Help users to connect and form groups based on the shared interests

Connecting users to others is one of the most powerful ways to keep people in the community and stimulate their activity. The more effectively users create connections between each other, the faster the community will grow. Relationships (the connections) are created through shared positive experiences. A user’s feeling of belonging to a group directly depends on what kind of relationship and with what kind of people they will have.

Usually connections occur naturally by chance when users with similar or complementary interests happen to be in the same place at the same time, have the opportunity to act, and are not afraid to do so. To accelerate the growth of your community, you need to intentionally bring together users who can positively influence each other and create opportunities for them to interact.

Keep an eye on users’ interests and needs that can complement each other

When you see users who have some needs on one hand and other users who have an interest in meeting those needs on the other hand, and the users do not intersect naturally or intersect but not in a timely manner, you need to help coordinate the users. The easiest approach is to maintain relationships with active regular users and know the types of activities they prefer to act on. When these activities appear on the platform, notify the users so they can show off their skills. This can be done manually by you, by volunteers, or via some automatization if your platform allows it.

Create opportunities for joint activities

When you see users who, due to the patterns of their participation, have little overlap with each other in the community, but who would be interested in getting to know each other, you need to create opportunities for these users to be engaged in a shared experience on the platform.

The simplest approach to organizing a shared experience is to impose time and place limits on some type of activities that the users are interested in for some period of time. The type of activities and the place do not really matter, the goal is to do something useful together.

Typical activities that encourage shared experience:

Contests. The primary requirement is that the contests are interesting to the selected segment of users. Usually contests have a theme, clear rules for winning and a timing. You can use some branded swag as prizes.
Seasonal events are activities dedicated to some widely recognized public holidays or any important dates for the users.
Improvement activities. Any activities aimed at improving the structure and quality of content, identifying unfound violations of the rules, removing unnecessary content, creating missing content, and etc. All kinds of activities that users would like to do, but never got around to.
Meta-discussions. Discussions about important aspects of the platform and the community that users care about and have personal opinions on.

Tell users about other users

To build deep, trusting relationships, users need to know the others as real people. This requires users knowing some interesting facts about other users in a way that causes positive emotions and sympathy and having a chance to self-disclose about themselves and their interests on the other hand. Such conversations rarely occur naturally, since this topic goes beyond the scope of most online communities.

Your task is to organize activities that introduce users to each other without harming the community itself. Here are some activities that stimulate building relationships:

Highlighting users’ achievements in the social media. You cover almost any event that somehow shows users’ positive contributions.
Hosting offline meetups. If possible, attend them in person yourself. If you cannot make it, find some volunteers you trust who are able and willing to organize the events. Have some swag prepared. If the meetup is organized by volunteers, send them swag so that they can give them to the attendees. The meetup can take place anywhere, from the office of some company to a random cafe. There is no need to have any strict theme for a meetup. Providing users a way to get to know each other is the goal in itself. Take photos of the events and share a story about the event afterwards.
Creating a media channel dedicated to the users themselves where you will post stories about the users. It can be in any popular format like webcast, podcast, text blog or something else. Interview active regular users, giving them an opportunity to talk about everything that worries them, starting from the current problems of the industry up to their pet-projects or their favorite outdoor activities.

3. Find leaders among the users and help them with the initiatives they propose

To continue to grow the community you need to identify volunteers who want to lead the content initiatives and organizational meta-work like initiating meta-discussions, compiling FAQs, hosting meetups, etc.

Any initiatives will be more successful if they are proposed and led by the users themselves. Initiatives led by users who have popularity, authority, or some other special social status in the community, as well as by users who actively help other users, will be especially effective. The more users feel sympathy towards the author of an initiative, the greater the activation will be among them.

Look for volunteers proactively

There are two primary approaches to the search.

Manual search. Look for users who are already doing what you expect your future volunteers to do. Contact each user individually, talk with them about the needs of the community, and offer them an “official position” as a volunteer. Users might consider a place in the social hierarchy of the community as an additional reward for the work they already do.
Ask for help publicly. Reach out to the community in need of volunteer help. Describe specific tasks to be done, your expectations for the future volunteers and what those willing to apply should do to propose themself.

Volunteering is a way to become even more engaged in the community. Future volunteers need to like the community and want to help grow it in the first place.

Encourage users to become volunteers

All users in any community have some unique talents. Your task is to provide them with opportunities so that they can show off their talents to the best of their ability. Users may be shy, afraid of criticism, or don’t know where to start. You need to support the users morally, instill faith in them that they will succeed and should try.

The ability to positively impact many people through initiatives in your community is an effective motivator that may encourage users to become more active.

Make it so it is safe for volunteers to make mistakes

Never criticize or give your personal assessment of the initiatives volunteers propose. Volunteers are not professionals; it is fine for their initiatives to look amateur. You need to give volunteers the opportunity to try whatever seems appropriate to them. There is only one case when it is worth asking volunteers to postpone launching an initiative, when the initiative is outright harmful to the community. If you can make volunteers enjoy working on their initiatives, it is already a win.

Volunteers must be autonomous

Avoid initiatives that require a lot of time investment on your part. If you need to spend a lot of time on providing support for some initiatives, you won’t be able to help many other people and won’t have time to plan the next steps to grow the community. Your time is limited, this approach is not scalable.

Try to provide volunteers with access to all necessary tools and information. If this is not enough and you are required to do some repetitive activities that take a lot of your time, kindly ask volunteers to adjust the proposed initiatives.

Recognize volunteers’ contribution to successful initiatives as much as you can

Social recognition and praise are positive feedback. You need to regularly tell the community about successful initiatives and their authors though all media channels you have. The more volunteers feel that their contribution is recognized fairly the more likely they will propose and participate in new initiatives. Visible examples of successful initiatives and public recognition of the contributors motivate other users to become volunteers themselves.

If something goes wrong with an initiative, cover for the authors and volunteers

Some users feel a sense of fear of making an error and are afraid of situations where they potentially can be publicly criticized. This holds the users from becoming volunteers and prevents users from revealing their talents. If users can sense even the slightest confirmation of their fears, it will be very difficult for you to persuade them to become volunteers. Whatever happens, always support existing volunteers, cover them publicly and support them in private conversations. Volunteers should never experience any negative emotions or feelings of guilt if initiatives they participate in fail.

One effective approach to accomplish this is to create such a culture in which mistakes are encouraged. The thing that might help is facilitating public discussions of situations where something went wrong, without mentioning specific users, with further proposals for improving the initiative.

Maintain trusting relationships with volunteers

Constantly keep talking with the volunteers and monitor their morale. Here are a few topics one can talk with volunteers about.

Answer all volunteers’ questions, provide feedback when they ask for, share with them your thoughts and experiences.
Give volunteers extra information that is not publicly available
Talk with volunteers about the community needs and new opportunities for initiatives available.
Ask volunteers for feedback about the community and what future they see for it

The better your relationship with volunteers and the more volunteers trust you, the more active they are.

Volunteers are a community within a community

Once there are a few active volunteers in the community (usually 5 - 10 people), maintaining relationships with each volunteer individually becomes difficult and time consuming. You need to create a dedicated space only for volunteers where you can communicate to all of them at once and volunteers can interact with one another.

Everything that is true for an online community in general is also true for a group of volunteers (goals, tools, etc.). The main nuance is that the mission of the sub–community of volunteers is always the same - the success of the main community.