View source for Reducing barriers to volunteering

There’s some disconnect between non-profits and tech volunteers.

What are the challenges:
*No dedicated community management role.
*Defining bite sized of pieces of work.
*Disorganization.
*Projects that are like too big too quick. The non profit can’t support
the thing the volunteer wants to do.
*Non-profits not knowing what to ask for. Not having a clear thing to say
“this is what we need you to do for us”
*Onboarding process: Getting them to the process where they can actually work
*“By the time I onboard that person, I should be hiring them”
*The tradeoff of what that volunteer did vs. what a full time employee
*Retention is a major issue. 70% come once twice and never again
*Why the 30% of volunteers say - after their spent the first hour
*It’s hard to identify something that the things that a newcomer can do
immediately

*Organizations under-estimate how much work that it is to work with
volunteers

*Onboarding is the burden. Once the on boarding is smooth, that will take
care of what is smooth.

*Is anybody doing this successfully? Matching tech volunteers.

*Less so with coders and developers
*We have success with business analysts because they are consultative,
customer-facing.
*“Discovery” -> “Design” -> “Build” -> “Maintain”
*Team for tech - they do some great projects with non-profits. They
commit to work with a project for 3-5 years. They’re doing the project
management for that non-profit.

Having a dedicated staff member. Project manager - the person that
answers their questions and gets them set up. 

This person checks in and
makes sure that things go okay. That person usually doesn’t exist at
many non-profit. 

It would be most productive if that person is in the
non-profit who knows the non-profit.

A person that holds their hand
through it. Volunteers go off on a code tangent.

The coding part is unique for developers. It’s a lot of set up.
*Have volunteers build the role itself.
*Tech volunteers there is a hierarchy in tech - people don’t want to do
the volunteer on boarding work. Orgs want to retain the engineering staff.
*Certain things lend themselves better to volunteers.
*Bugfixes are much simpler but many people don’t want to do that because
it’s boring.
*Putting a small team of volunteers onto prototyping projects might be a
good use of volunteers.
*Skipped the onboarding, basically was just milestone checks for the day

*The volunteer is looking for the bite-sized chunk. The non-profit needs
more comprehensive support though. So it feels like there is a
disconnect between the two.

*There is a minimum bar for contribution, some people might need to spend
some time going through some tutorials. Maybe there should be a
“readiness” checklist - things you should know prior to contributing.

Onboarding

*Readiness checklist with examples - “if you don’t know git here’s a
tutorial”
*Dev environment spin up should be very smooth.
*Really great documentation.
*Needs finding has to go both ways - what’s the takeaway.
*Have the contributor CLA verifying they’ve read the contributor guidelines
*More time needs to be spent on devops if it’s not smooth.
*Wikimedia has a matchmaking process where a volunteer fills out a form.
*They have hundreds of volunteers to. What are the items to be done and
what can the volunteer do?
*Need a checklist for both the volunteer and non-profit.
*Direct contact with users.
*“The journey is part of the experience”

Where is the most valuable place to use volunteers?
Non-critical tasks that we still really want
We have to focus on these critical tasks

Are hackathons useful?
*Maybe, but often the non-profit doesn’t get much out of it.
*One successful hackathon was where people came with particular area
problems, create prototypes, and it was long (9am-10pm).
*Invite only hackathons are definitely useful.
*Gone from a one day event to a three day event. The people that show up
for a three day event are way more committed. The quality of their
presence is much higher.
*Structured events go better.

Maybe some of the practices that have been acquired from the coding
communities would be useful in other spheres.