Ask HN: What has succeeded for you when working with volunteers?

28 points by jhogendorn 3 years ago | 14 comments

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.

Some topics where we have found friction:

* 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"

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?

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?

What has been your biggest learnings in this space?

davidbanham 3 years ago |

Figure out why people show up. This may be homogenous across the group, but more likely there are two or three main categories.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Source: volunteer firefighter that manages an equipment maintenance team and spends way too much of his time doing stuff because he loves it.

jhogendorn 3 years ago | |

These are all great, although they're more concepts than implementable things. I see a lot of mirrors in my own experiences for sure.

Our volunteers seem to fall into:

  * Obsessive Crazy People (myself): Very committed, for no discernable reason. Organisation survives because a few people are like this at any time.
  * I Want Control: Someone wants to exercise their will or way of doing things over an area or similar. Put a bridle on them and lets go
  * I Enjoy Tinkering: I like to help out and scratch my itches, but I wont commit to anything specifically and its mostly about fun and following my personal interests.
  * I Will Volunteer for X: A discount, kibble, free soft drink. Extrinsicaly motivated by some external factor or gamification.
  * Saints: I just want to help and give back.

So I see some overlap in your descriptions there. Attrition and Job handover is super tricky. Or really, formalising the training of things is a whole big job in itself, so often people get thrown into things and told to swim. Not great, but as a firefighter you probably know sometimes its hard to know which fire to fight...

Do you have any suggestions re sophisticated collaborative structures?

jonah 3 years 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.

jhogendorn 3 years 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?

throwayyy479087 3 years ago |

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

lathiat 3 years ago | |

It's absolutely critical to have some at structures in place to deal with this. While some level of this often surfaces anywhere you have human relationships, it is 100% made much worse by a bad culture that is allowed to perpetuate.

- Code of Conduct longer than 3 lines clearly spelling out expectations. Not everyone has the same "obvious" expectations.

- Clear written process for dealing with complaints, member suspensions and expulsions.

- Just get rid of people that are consistently abrasive and cause problems with multiple other people over time, no matter how good or important they are. Just blamelessly ship them out earlier than later. Somehow. But it's easier said than done. A clear code of conduct sooner than later to fall back on as the "bad guy" helps rather than needing individual people to make the "bad guy" decision. You can just follow the process and whoever it's instituted against has a clear set of rules to expect.

jhogendorn 3 years ago | | |

We have learnt these lessons the hard way, repeatedly, until maybe some of it has sunk in.

I've lost count of how many times i've pointed out that you cannot put good and bad actions on a scale and try to balance them. Good actions are good in one pile, and bad actions are bad in their own pile, and that pile has to stay real, real small. Conflict avoidant people who are new (to you, ie me the 10yr veteran vs the 3yr 'newbie') really, really struggle with 'ostracising'.

Our code of conduct is pretty average tbqh. Do you have any examples of ones that you would consider exemplary or have particularly interesting points or approaches?

samtho 3 years ago | |

Hot countertake: you have poor judgement on where you volunteer.

I think the key to avoid this is to volunteer in situations where there are smaller groups and are very focused.

adinb 3 years ago |

In my experience, short tasks/projects that have a definite end work the best. Do not 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.

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!

Recognition is another huge motivator. Newsletters, meetings, special awards, you name it.

Volunteers are hard. A good volunteer coordinator is worth their weight in gold!

If anyone has specific questions, I’m happy to answer.

(I helped run an all volunteer charity for about a decade)

jhogendorn 3 years ago | |

I recently had a new person, strong neurodivergent who struggled greatly with the fact we were/are an organisation with many flaws we are working on. They came to me after their first week with a 9 point plan to fix volunteering. Point 1: Get a volunteer coordinator. I felt like hank scorpio palm to forehead, a volunteer coordinator, why didn't I think of that? We were of course super aware of it, nearly impossible role to fill. I'd give a limb for one almost.

Burnout is _the_ monster that I'm trying to fight, more people, smaller workloads. Predicated on getting more people however.

Setting tasks is... well you learn that you have to train people how to do it. And how SMART Goals are one thing, and actionable tasks are another (subset thing). If you write the task as a Goal, when it comes time to assess if its done, you play the interpretation game and it gets a bit rough.

I think skill building is a big factor that, while we talk about it, we should highlight it more front and center.

Recognition is definitely powerful, as I said in another comment, the issue I've found with it is that if you miss just one person, they tend to feel much worse than if you thank no-one. Hard to catch everyone in that net.

We have been talking about gamification ideas lately, letting volunteers get some form of karma point for doing certain tasks, letting volunteers 'fist bump' each other to tip karma as thanks for a job. Then its a self reporting issue and harder to be left out. Still chewing the idea over, feels like capitalism with extra steps.

Volunteers are definitely hard. If i ever get a coordinator i may nail them to the floorboards.

How did you organise your charity? heirarchical, groups by area or topic? how did they work together?

Do you have any tips on how to get people to do the boring jobs. "Please update the asset register for your area with the msds for anything you keep in stock" 2 hour job. Like pulling teeth, but i need it for compliance.

eucryphia 3 years ago |

Some really good responses here.

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.

This is apart from being put off by those difficult volunteers who do most of the work but want to run every aspect.

And although you can't 'sack' a volunteer, you can 'succession management' them.

jhogendorn 3 years ago | |

Huh, I had not considered that failing their own expectations of what they can volunteer might be a factor in leaving. I'm going to have to think on that for a bit.

We definitely caution against taking on too much at first, or we give them clear deescalation paths should they struggle.

Hey, hey don't call me out like that. I'm the problem, its me. I absolutely have a tendency to do most of the work but want to run/control things tightly. Always pushing back on myself to try and chill out.

What do you think the main reasons volunteers quit are?

lathiat 3 years ago |

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

* Obsessive Crazy People (myself): Very committed, for no discernable reason. Organisation survives because a few people are like this at any time. * I Want Control: Someone wants to exercise their will or way of doing things over an area or similar. Put a bridle on them and lets go * I Enjoy Tinkering: I like to help out and scratch my itches, but I wont commit to anything specifically and its mostly about fun and following my personal interests. * I Will Volunteer for X: A discount, kibble, free soft drink. Extrinsicaly motivated by some external factor or gamification. * Saints: I just want to help and give back.

* 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.