Intended audience: DataKind Volunteers
Volunteer team coordination is a special type of project leadership. It’s not easy; you can’t lead a volunteer team with the same tools that you’d have in a paid corporate role. But when you have a team of volunteers enthusiastically engaged in making the world a little better, it’s an amazing sight to behold.
The key to successful volunteer engagement is communication and empowering volunteers with the support they need to be successful in the project! This means being able to extract and push information to and from the right people, and serving as an advocate for your volunteers. Be sure to:
- Ensure volunteers understand their role
- Discuss mutual expectations for a successful collaboration
- Have regular meetings
- Be available and respond promptly
- Be understanding and empathetic
- Provide timely feedback to volunteers and ask for feedback from volunteers
- Allow some flexibility in schedule and work style -- understand that people work best at different times and in different ways
The rest of this article will discuss some tools and tactical considerations to consider when you run your volunteer team.
Engaging
Make sure that your volunteers are engaged! Chat with your volunteers regularly, so that you understand what motivates their desire to contribute. Ask them for feedback on how they can be supported and share feedback on their progress. If enthusiasm fades among individual volunteers, have a chat with them to figure out why, and whether there’s anything you can do to ensure that they have a better experience.
Reasonable Timelines
Your project is a marathon, not a sprint. And similar to how you’d want runners to pace themselves in a 26.2 mile run, set realistic timelines that emphasize steady, continuous progress. An aggressive timeline that causes volunteer burnout will likely lead to project failure.
When in doubt, poll your volunteers to gauge whether a project timeline makes sense. If you need to push a deadline back, be transparent and notify project stakeholders early. A delayed timeline that you can meet is better than missing a deadline. Celebrate wins along the way - each win builds upon another in order to have a successful project.
Weekly Meetings
Weekly volunteer meetings are an important way to keep the project on track and make sure that volunteers are doing the right things. They provide structure around a project, and allow volunteers to schedule their own time for project deliverables to get done. You can think of the weekly meeting as a de facto deadline for smaller tasks.
At minimum, use weekly meetings to get a sense of what volunteers have accomplished in the previous week, confirm next steps, and find out if there are any blockers to progress so that they can be swiftly resolved. But that’s just the minimum -- there’s a lot of room for creative leadership here. For example, consider implementing a variant of Edward de Bono’s“Six Thinking Hats” system for parallel thinking. By asking volunteers guided questions that cycle through the following thinking modes, you can elicit many types of information about your project.
Meetings should be scheduled to take place at the same time each week. They can be conducted as stand-up meetings or in-depth work sessions, depending on your project’s needs. They can also be conducted in-person or online (via a conference line such as Zoom).
Slack Communication
Slack is great for asynchronous communication between yourself and other volunteers. Consider creating a channel for your project in the DataKind Community Slack workspace, and encouraging volunteers to use the channel for internal team communications rather than email. Volunteers can use the channel to bond over common interests and learnings, something particularly important with remote work. Building a sense of trust and camaraderie can bolster the motivation of your volunteers and help them think through the nuances behind a project.
Shared Drives and Docs
It’s important to have a shared Google Drive to store project materials, including anything that needs to be shared among volunteers, such as documentation from the Project Partner or meeting notes.
Remember to be mindful of the sharing permissions on the shared Google Drive Folders and Docs. By default, keep the shared drive private among the partner organization, DataKind staff, and the volunteer team. You can change permission settings for individual files or documents on a case-by-case basis.
GitHub
Since code for the project will be stored in a GitHub repository, make sure that members of your volunteer team have the appropriate level of access! Volunteers who contribute code should at least have the ability to make Pull Requests.
Each GitHub repo also comes with a suite of productivity and team coordination tools. Some tools that to consider using include:
- Issue Tracker - Issue Tracker is a standard tool in open source software development, and provides a convenient way to track and assign tasks among volunteers.
- Project Wiki - It’s up to you to decide how to divide your documentation between your Project Wiki or other options (such as the README.md file or documents in your shared Google Drive). Just remember to be consistent! And consider that Wiki pages on GitHub allows you to create documentation that’s clean, pretty, and easily-accessible.
- Project Board - If you want to use a Kanban board to track your project, you can! GitHub provides a Project Board that integrates nicely with its other features (such as Issue Tracker).
Contributer(s): Daniel Nissani, Seward Lee, Rachel Wells
Contact us
If you would like to learn more about us, partner with us, or get in touch, email us at community@datakind.org
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