Tips from Organizers

Lighten the Load: How to Encourage Your Community to Help Out

Community members want to get involved; here’s how you can unlock their potential.

how-to-encourage-community-members-to-help_meetup

By Jono Bacon

One of the most powerful elements of building a community is that your community can come together to provide expertise, insight, and time. They can be an invaluable resource for building an amazing Meetup experience.

Just take a typical Meetup group. Imagine you have 20 people in your group. Those 20 people have an incredible combined level of expertise, skills, insight, and potential time to contribute to the meetup. If only 1/4 of those members can help for an hour each week, you can do more, reach more people, and deliver a better community and event experience.

As such, we want to unlock that expertise, time, and insight. That’s what this article is all about: how to unlock the contributions of your members.

Know where the work lives

The vast majority of communities I have worked with have people who want to help, but their leaders don’t know how to delegate. As such, all that contribution potential is lost.

Before we can get people involved in helping your group, you first need to know what you need help with. For example, for a typical Meetup group, here some common tasks event organizers can have members help with:

Helping you to pick the best date and time for your events.
Coming up with ideas for content, discussions, and material.
Contributing presentations, facilitating discussions, and running workshops.
Finding and arranging guest speakers, regional experts, and other outside input.
Coordinating the overall speaker experience: how they join, how long they speak for, what equipment you provide, etc.
Promoting your group on social media, via your homepage, in regional stores/libraries/etc.
Helping with technical infrastructure, tools, and more.

Now, for some of these you are probably going to say, “I can’t delegate that one, I have to do that myself.” Ask yourself if this is really the case though. Is there no way at all you can’t delegate or spread the load?

From my experience, very few tasks can only be done by one specific person. Sometimes though it may take a little bit of process to ensure everything gets accomplished at the quality you want it to be.

Create a shared project plan

If you look at some of the greatest online collaborative communities such as GitHub, GitLab, Salesforce, Wikipedia, and more, they track their shared projects in an online platform. This system will list out the different tasks, who is involved, and what the current status is.

This doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be a Trello Board or a Google Spreadsheet. Importantly, list out all the different tasks you need to focus on for a meeting or project and have a place where you can assign an “owner” for that task.

Make sure everyone in the group can see this shared document. Set a cultural expectation that we operate out in the open and keep the document up to date.

Ask for help

Now comes the most critical piece: reach out and ask for help. It might sound patronizingly simple, but the most effective way to spread the load in a community is to reach out to specific team members and ask if they can help.

Need help finding and bringing in speakers? Maybe Jane, who has been to most meetings, would be able to help. Need help coordinate snacks and drinks? Miguel works downtown near the venue and might be able to help. Reach out and ask folks for help and make it clear you want to make it as low-stress and hassle-free as possible.

Importantly, have a specific ask; a specific task you need them to do. If you are specific and provide reassurances about making it as stress-free as possible, in many cases they will say yes. If they are busy, no sweat: just reach out to someone else. Track these specific tasks and assignments in your shared online project plan, and keep going until you have all the work assigned.

Now, work through the tasks and check in with your volunteers to ensure everything is proceeding to plan. Provide help and guidance when they get stuck, and if people get busy, try to find other folks to help too. This is critical: every project needs a project leader to help pull the strings together.

Celebrate participation

Now, and this is critical, when you run your next meetup or project, spend a few minutes at the beginning namechecking and highlighting all the folks who helped. Celebrate them, make them feel valued and cherished, and give them the social props in front of the other members that they really helped pull things together.

This serves two important purposes.

Firstly, it makes those individuals feel rightly appreciated and valued. This will encourage then to help out again in the future.
Secondly, it makes it very clear to the broader group that this is a real team effort and we can come together as a community to participate. Many other members may not realize that they are welcome to help and this will remove that ambiguity.

Now, you may be a little nervous about starting with this volunteer delegation process, but I recommend you start small. Brainstorm your next event and have people just help with one small portion—such as putting together some simple email communications for your members or coordinating some content. Then, gradually open the tent and expand the help people can provide.

This will take practice. Not everyone has expertise in delegation, especially delegation to volunteers, but the investment of time and learning is more than worth it. In the long-term you will