Social Engineering
Volunteers, Sub-Groups & the Insider Group
Volunteer
What volunteers can do in communities
Volunteers can typically undertake a variety of the following activities:
Content creating/editing
Initiating and sustaining discussions
Moderating activities/removing spam etc
Platform maintenance
Organizing/supporting community events and activities
Welcoming newcomers and building relationships with key members
Training and supporting other volunteers
Inviting people to join the community
Promoting the community externally
Collecting/analyzing data.
Recruiting Volunteers
There are four effective ways to recruit volunteers.
Headhunt specific people. Find people with unique skills, knowledge, experience, or passion and persuade them to become volunteers. These are people that can specifically add unique value to the community as opposed to those whom take on simpler, process-orientated tasks.
Target existing contributors. Find people that have made an above average contribution to the community, or a number of contributions, and persuade them to become volunteers.
Soliciting applications. You call for people to apply for positions. This gives higher prestige to the positions being advertised. Don’t let anyone volunteer, pick from the best. The more exclusive, the more people are keen to do it.
Invite people to pledge a contribution based upon their skills. This is known as the ABCD approach (asset-based community development). It asks people to highlight what skills they can contribute to the community and then encourages them to pledge those skills to specific tasks within the community.
Befriend key members
Create a number of community teams. Start small with just a few teams mapped to personas and grow as more people join the community.
Mentor these teams in developing their own culture, team spirit, mascots, and more. This builds safety and belonging.
Ensure that these teams are regularly communicating effectively with each other.
Hold regular meetings and check-ins with active members, as a measure to detect and reduce uncertainty.
Provide a way for the community to give feedback and optimize how they work together.
Identify and create popular sub groups
Train and manage leaders and sub-groups
Promote and support sub-groups
Retaining Volunteers
Ensure the volunteers frequently interact with each other.
Highlight the history and progress made by volunteers. It's crucial to track progress on a week by week basis, not on a broad annual basis.
Provide volunteers with further influence within the volunteer group.
Allow off-topic discussions between volunteers to facilitate group bonding.
Sub Groups
Once the community hits the maturity phase of the community lifecycle, it needs people to help lead sub-groups. Without them, you get trapped with a small group of members driving all the activity.
To nurture leaders you need to resolve the tension between their need for competence, autonomy, and relatedness against your own need to have enough control to ensure they don’t tarnish your community.
The most common mistake is to enable everyone to create groups. This leads to a lot of dead groups littering the community. There are better models out there:
| Who can lead? | Level of support | No. of groups | Pros | Cons |
Anything goes (‘Eve Online’) | Anyone | Tech only | Unlimited | Leaders have full control, low cost | No control over leaders who can harm the brand by association |
Enable everyone (Reddit) | Members with a 50+ Reddit score | Tech/social | Unlimited | Supports people who want to maintain a good relationship | Doesn’t focus on those who can have biggest impact High cost |
Support the best (Facebook) | Anyone | Best groups get promotion and expertise | Unlimited | Supports people who prove they can succeed Medium cost | Great leaders might slip through the cracks |
Pick the winners (Wikimedia Foundation) | Anyone | Financial | Unlimited | Biggest impact for resources Medium cost | Can waste resources if they fail |
Create limited roles (Mozilla) | Need to apply | Training program/full access | 200 | Retains power Medium cost | Limits potential no. leaders |
Iron grip (StackExchange) | Prove they can lead a group | Promotion on very popular site | One-group per topic | Retails power and keeps only the best leaders | Deters many great leaders Very high cost |
Insider Group
Recruiting the Insider Group
Headhunt members of insider groups. The insider group must be representative of the community and not solely those who put themselves forward.
Heavily moderate discussions and schedule actions. This group has a specific purpose and requires a tighter level of moderation than other parts of the community. Keep a clearly defined list of tasks that this group should be doing with fixed deadlines, e.g. opinions for change of site design by November 2nd. The group must have clearly established discussion topics and a summary of the group consensus.
Rotate membership. Rotate members over a period of time depending upon their levels of activity and quality of contributions.
Build the group early.
Publish membership of the group. The group’s existence should be transparent. Its purpose and list of members should be published within the community for members to see. This gives members recognition but also ensures the non-insiders know that this group is representative of the community.
Name the group. The insider group should have a name that is a symbol used within the community. This name should not be linked to any association with authority over other members. Such a name will provoke a negative backlash from community members.
Publish the outcomes of the group. The community manager should publish the summary of what the group has decided.
Community Principles
Developing the Community Principles
Developing this constitution is a collaborative exercise. The community moderator must engage members and proactively seek their input (if not entrusting the entire process to volunteers). This should be a short document that defines the following:
Purpose of the community. Why does the community exist? What benefit does it provide to members?
Personality of the community. Is the community loving? Jovial? Serious? Intelligent? Sarcastic? Let the community members identify the personality of the community.
Beliefs of the community. Does the community believe that information should be free? That certain products should be banned? How could the industry be better? What are the core, sacred, beliefs of the community?
Community governance. How is the community run? What rights/powers/protections do members have? What can the community manager do or not do?
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