Any volunteers? How to reduce costs and increase activity

All online communities cost. There is a cost to specify and build or configure an existing application, the cost of hosting and the cost of ongoing maintenance. These are tangible costs, often fixed, that those responsible for budgeting across the organisation understand and for which there are precedents. But as discussed under What is an online community? pricing the technology does not provide the true cost of an online community. The real cost is on-going human facilitation, moderation, evaluation and value extraction – the job of a professional community manager.

All communities – physical or online – depend on volunteers and most established communities have a mix of paid-for support as well. Without volunteers there is no community. These are the people who are elected to do unpaid committee work or fundraising and online provide a similar commitment that translates into continuous support and encouragement to others. Some organisations’ reason for being is volunteering. The VSO community that SiftGroups set up is dedicated to giving voice to volunteers in the field and to enable returning volunteers to engage with each other and encourage new recruits. Usually online it is not possible to scale a community without volunteers. For most the alternative of increasing the professional management headcount as the community grows is unaffordable, as well as inappropriate.

So what makes a good online volunteer and how is he or she identified and nurtured?

Picture: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hoysili2007/2099435722/

Understanding our online persona

Unlike the physical world, how we present ourselves to others online cannot carry the same or similar nuances or subtleties. It’s easy to be misunderstood or intimidated by others just through our handling of a few keystrokes. There are many models of how we change our behaviour online. Charlene Li, from Forrester Research and co-author of Groundswell devised the ‘social technographic ladder’ to describe our different states of participation – from Inactive (52%) to Spectators (33%), Joiners (19%), Collectors (15%), Critics (19%) and finally Creators (13%). The percentages for those of us who are active indicate an overlap of participation – in other words I could be both a Creator and a Collector (someone who uses services like delicious).

When Sean O’Driscoll was at Microsoft he used a simpler approach distinguishing 70% of Lurkers (‘those satisfied with Web 1.0’) from the active Joiners (20%) and those embracing Web 2.0, the Regulars (9%) and the Elite (1%). (Note how we feel about that word Lurker!) He also adds two other categories Moderators and Internals to cover off employees. Microsoft then distinguishes categories of conversation, which can align with a company’s departments – for example, Sentiment and PR; Learning and product development; Story-telling and marketing; Feedback and customer service – and there are many monitoring services that attempt to analyse these different contexts. The point of all this is to identify the volunteers, which, in the case of Microsoft and any other corporate looking to create relationships with its customers, ultimately means ‘Affinity’ groups. In these terms the simple progression of participation is Satisfaction (I like you) drives Loyalty (I recommend you) which drives Affinity (I defend you) – the ‘holy grail’ of any good business.

Understanding our motivations to do something for nothing

We all do something for nothing without questioning it – it’s in our nature. The definition of neighbourliness is being able to borrow something without having to attach a monetary value to the action. At some point the favour will be returned. People want to connect with people. People want to help and be helped and we all operate in a social framework (I do it for ‘love’) or a market framework (I do it for money). The essential truth is that if you (as the owner of the environment and as someone in a position to set the rules of engagement) move someone from a social framework to a market framework there’s no going back. Once you pay someone for a service you can never expect them to deliver the same service again for nothing.

This has implications for how we reward the actions of our volunteers. Many studies have demonstrated that people are more productive if they give freely rather than be paid for a specific task. The fundamental downside is that they can walk away at any time if their original motivations are not sustained. This means not only do community managers need to identify and nurture volunteers but they also need to plan for succession – in other words anticipate a constant refreshing of the volunteer pool.

Here’s how Microsoft does it:

• Find: Those most engaged with the product - usually through their blogs. Important to listen before engaging them

• Thank: Provide community badges but rely on altruism - i.e. the social not market driver

• Engage and empower: Connect authentic, organic conversations from the community with corporate showcases

In other words, it’s about reputation, kudos and recognition. At SiftGroups we recommend our clients put aside an ‘entertainment’ budget to cover such things as travel and meal costs in the context of bringing volunteers together for physical meetings. In the CIPD community the principal volunteers (we call them ‘Champions’) are given free entry to chargeable events, such as the annual conference. We also offer them community management training – for many an attractive entry on their CV.

SiftGroups ‘participation matrix’

So what is SiftGroups approach to online participation? We recognise that there are different behavioural characteristics online which reflect both who we are and how we respond in an online environment. We have mapped each characteristic to the functionality that needs to be in place to support the behaviour and these characteristics and functionalities are overlaid with the 90-9-1 rule-of-thumb. For example, roughly 90% of us are Readers. The functionality we need is the ability to easily browse and search for the content. There are many online community platforms out there that are clearly built for the 10% active participants where it is virtually impossible to find anything, which forces many to give up or some to ask a question that has been asked (and answered) many times before.

The other characteristics or roles that we deploy are Enquirer, Responder, Expert, Curator, Talker and Leader. They all attract increasingly sophisticated functionality that culminates in the Leader’s or Champion’s role having access to many of the control functionalities (such as moving a post) that are part of the professional community manager’s kit.

In other words we are consciously blurring the distinction between the professional and the volunteer to the benefit of the whole community.