How to build a community of volunteers

Lauren Cucinotta

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How many of you work with or want to work with volunteers?

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Where do you find volunteers?

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Volunteers are the users that are so passionate about your product

that they want to take action

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Working with volunteers is a balance

between...

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Practical

Emotional

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Practical

•Scale

•Outreach

•Product development

•Giving away control

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Emotional

•Passion

•Creativity•Innovation

•Fun

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A community built on trust

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Over 10,000 events

~ 1800 active licensees

162 countries

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Volunteer Communities

• Levo League (Local Levo)

• Google (City Experts)

• TED Open Translation Project

• DuoLingo

• Mozilla

• YEC

• The Fetch

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3 things to think about...

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1.Where will your business benefit from volunteers?

2.Where in your workflow will you work with volunteers?

3. How do you track their impact?

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Where will you benefit from volunteers?

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Some areas =

• Content creation

• Localization/globalization

• Product development

• Outreach

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Where in your workflow do you

work with volunteers?

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Examples

• Local events

• Local outreach• QA testing

• Content creation

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When figuring their role...

• Volunteer community members (do not equal) employees

• Not getting paid

• Not full-time

• Don’t have insider knowledge how the team works, or of the hard-to-define team dynamic

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Tips

• Set clear boundaries

• Be realistic

• Be experimental!

• Allow them to decide how much they can take on (they lead, you facilitate)

• Keep it useful for everyone

• Remind everyone the “reasons why we are here”

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The structure will change over time, you won’t know until you

experiment!

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Tracking the impact of volunteer

programs

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Content

• What percentage of your content is from volunteers?

• What percentage of content is what volunteers do?

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Outreach

• Do your volunteers reach markets that you can’t?

• How many more people were you able to reach?

• Do they give you local insight?

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Product development

• Has an idea from a volunteer become a product?

• Do volunteers help with product release and testing?

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7 building blocks of successful volunteer

programs

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Passion

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• Create a product that people can be passionate about

• Give people the ability to share their passion

How do you harness passion?

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Some areas =TEDx

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Think about...

• What are things about your core product that people like?

• Where are places that you can put passion into action?

• Where are there opportunities to share passion?

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Rules

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Create parameters to give you room to play

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YEC

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TEDx

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Think about...

• What are the minimum parameters you would feel comfortable with?

• Rules will change over time

• Give them the tools they need to carry out responsibilities effectively

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Mission

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Why are we here?

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Mozilla

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Duolingo

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A mission promotes community,

collaboration, and can even diffuse conflict

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How can you do it?

• Write a manifesto co-created by you and your volunteers

• Repeat a common phrase/ethos in communication

• Create the feeling in meetings, and in person events

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Empowerment

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Empowerment is the opposite of control

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Levo League

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How can you give volunteers the freedom to

innovate?

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Recognition

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Recognition is your currency

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How can you give recognition?

• Thank you!

• Credit

• Public acknowledgement

• Title

• Badges

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Google City Experts

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Engagement

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How do you keep people interested in what they are doing? And coming back for

more?

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Examples

• Community education

• Events

• Leadership opportunities

• Connections

Examples

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TEDx

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Provide opportunities for connection, growth and

new frontiers

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Impact

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We all want to work on something we feel is

important

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How can you make volunteers feel they are

making a difference?

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TEDx

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Practical

Emotional

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Trust is essential

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Collaborate, build, experiment with and

empower your volunteers

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