Do you have a volunteer group? How do communication with them?

[Stan Ward]

Hi,

I am curious what communication technologies folks are using for the volunteers associated their Transition Initiative.

We are just getting started, in the pre-Great Unleashing stage (in steps 1-3). For us, three categories of people seem to have emerged:

1 General Mailing List - People generally interested in knowing what is happening with the Transition Initiative and want to know about events. Broadcast emails sent to this group.

2. Initiating Group - Those people who have committed to regular weekly work on our Transition Initiative. These people are collaborating on lots of things. We are using Basecamp for this.

3. Volunteer/Highly Engaged Group - People who have a strong interest in our Transition Initiative, but are not a part of the Initiating Group. These people want to be a part of some of our larger group discussions (such as how we are going to "market" Transition in our community), want to help out with events, and generally want to support the Transition Initiative. We want to be able to leverage and work with this group in lots of ways.

How to best facilitate and communicate with this last group of people, the Volunteer/Highly Engaged Group, is the question we are considering. They seem to fall into a gray area for us. We are trying to balance between making it easy for them to join the volunteer group (including us being able to just add their email address for them), easy for multuple people to broadcast emails to them, and also possibly giving them some way to communicating with each other.

Here are the technologies we considering for the Volunteer Group:

A. Google Docs Spreadsheet + Email
B. Basecamp
C. Yahoo Groups
D. Ning
E. Constant Contact
F. Mailman, the GNU Mailing List Manager


QUESTIONS:

1. Do you have a volunteer group/highly engaged group, or something like it?

2. How do you communicate with this group? What technology/technologies?

3. How is the list of volunteers maintained?

4. Do your volunteers collaborate with each other? If so, how do they do it? Anything beyond the basics (phone, email, face-to-face meetings)?

5. Is there a single place or email address any member of the group can use to send a message to all of the volunteers/highly engaged?

Thank you for your input and please mention this discussion to your friends on Transition US who you think could help answer these questions for us.

Thanks!

Stan Ward
Transition Hamilton-Wenham (Hamilton & Wenham, Massachusetts, USA)

[Sandi Brockway]

I am a little confused, but let me see if I can shed some light or contribute some useful tips.

First, why do you think Ning cannot fulfill all your needs?

Also, it looks like Transition Massachusetts needs a lot more remodeling before it might be really useful. From the group you can develop your own mailing list. I notice that you are not using three of your features. No one is even utilizing Discussions, though it is turned on. Forums is the most useful part of your group, but someone has to take initiative to start the necessary and useful ones.

I have been remodeling TN, MI, CA, MN - currently. If there is anything there that I have done that looks remotely useful let me know. I have also started WORKGROUPS, PURPOSEFUL PERMACULTURE PRACTICES and BUILDING TRANSITION COALITIONS groups.

By having one central website devoted only to your initiative and local efforts, then everyone will know where they have to meet and it will be simple. If you find at some point your grow out of the group in Transition Massachusett, then you can start a ning site devoted only to your group and post that link in the original group entry in T-MA.ning.com.

You ahve many basic features in a GROUP, if you need help let me know. You should have no problem handling your entire crowd at all levels. You can setup different discussions with different purposes, and all emails are in MANAGE MEMBERS. you can add invite new members, and that email list will also be saved. you can import email lists.

The members themselves can decide what level they will participate and in what form.

After you are done looking at my groups and my ning work, then come back here and respond or write me personally.

[Stan Ward]

Hi Sandi,

Thank you for your in-depth reply. It is very helpful and I have to say that your response leaves me inspired to try harder to get people to join the Ning site, but still I have my concerns about Ning being a bit too much of a hurdle for some people.

I want to make it as easy as possible for people to be volunteers and receive the necessary communication for coordinating these volunteers. So far we have gotten about half the people to join the Ning site based on an email I sent. They seem to be those who are most passionate about Transition and also the most tech and social networking savvy. Note: I included my instructions to join Ning site as part of a larger invitation, so I can definitely try inviting people directly from Ning.

By inviting people again, using the Ning invitation system this time, and by also continuing to follow-up, I think we will be able to get more people on the Ning site, but I am not convinced I will be able to get 100% of the people on the Ning site, because of the need to register, questions to be answered, not liking social networks, not technical/technophobia, etc.

Compare this to me just adding them to a "volunteers list", which we keep in a Google Docs spreadsheet or using being a bit more sophisticated, we use a technology such Yahoo Groups or Constant Contact where we can do all the work of adding the volunteer email address and then each person can opt-in/opt-out as they choose. In this later case, I can be assured that I have 100% of the volunteers have been added to our list and will receive email communications from us.

I hope this helps clarify what I am thinking and my concerns.

By the way, our plan for our general mailing list (all the names we collect from our website and people who sign-up at Awareness Raising events) is to use Constant Contact, or something similar.

What are other people doing in this realm?

Thanks,
Stan

[Sandi Brockway]

I have found from experience if people are not motivated enough to learn a few rudimentary internet skills, they will suck too much time and energy. Ning truly is the simplest program around, it does not get much simpler.

In the case of the technologically impaired, an old fashion phone list or email list is all you can do - do not waste you time with them. I have done so many groups. If they are not committed enough to challenge themselves this little bit, why put your energy into them? If you have personal meetings, then do a phone tree for them. In fact, make a technophobes be responsible for the phone tree people and they can do it the old fashion way.

Make sure on the footer of your email you have the link information in case they want to venture out. Make sure it goes directly to the group.

Outside of that, act as if all the different levels of participation will occur, and develop your group presence such. Create organized Discussions entries. Post events regularly with tag codes, and RSS them into your groups RSS feed.

By all means make an email invite list, the note is limited, so make sure all the information is there. If you can send yourself only a test one. I have done Women In Black for six years. We send our regular email announcements but the same die hards show up. I have had one woman for three years say she will showup. LOL. Yes, I have other stories. Too bad we did not start this on my Coalition building board!

I do not know what Constant Contact is. Link? Have you looked through all the aps in MY PAGE just incase there is something there you can use?

There is no one way. You are the first I have had to begin discussing brass tacks. eventually i will have to outline something for my coalition building groups to help others like you get advise you need. now i just have a basic how to sheet i got from another group. it has nothing to do about the technical stuff.

[Patricia Greene]

Whoa, I beg to differ. Ning is quite complicated. I go into the transitionus ning site and I get depressed with all the busy stuff there. I can never find what I'm looking for. A blur of people and no list of state groups I can find and easily click on. I can hardly find myself. So I end up not using it, except when I get a notice like this, although I've been trained and we have a new Transition Group up here. Now I use computers every day, not that you'd call me savvy. I am a leader of our group, not an energy sucker. However, I am looking forward to the new official TransitionUS site to escape from the ning complication. Now if you could give us all a clear instruction sheet clickable from the home page as to how to use the ning site...maybe. But then, why should a site be so complicated you need instructions. Ugh.

[Sandi Brockway]

I agree with you totally.

The US site is really organized badly. i have complained from the beginning and only received a couple concessions after repeatedly asking. THe very first day I came to this board I as complaining about how lost I was here, so when I did my states boards I did it my way, or the way my members were suggesting - if it made sense and ended up with clean layout. I have surfed a lot of boards, and ran several programs at two sites for about 14 years now.

What I meant by Ning being easy is that that it is very easy to manage/admin. I have administered a lot of programs, and this is the easiest. So, it is easy to remodel. Have you ever tried JOOMLA, or DRAGONFLY? The later is easy too, but not as easy as Ning to administer. If someone knows what they are doing, they can whip it into an easy-to-follow state. You need to check out other open social software sites and see how they are laid out and designed. This layout has nothing much to do with Ning, it is all about the people who are designing it. You need to find features on other Open Social sites and other Ning sites, and complain that you want them here.

I have been remodeling the TN, CA, MI and MN sites so they are easier to follow. I am experimenting with TRANSITIONEARTH as a platform for globally integrating all sites with more global tools. Right now it is just a learning platform for me.

My full states list is right under a TAB called REGIONS, so no one can miss it and they can go right to any state or country they want in one click. All my instructions and other tools are neatly organized under Tabs. If you visit my sites you will see there is some logic in how it is organized. All my members are very happy - many collaborated directly with me on improvements and customizing. I welcome feedback, so please, visit and check them out. What state are you in?

I encourage others at other states sites to insure they think out their organization and I offer to help them. If I had this US site I would totally remodel it, it is so sloppy and disorganized.

But we are talking about the Massachusetts site, not the US site. The MA site is almost virgin and still has lots of hope. In regards to Stan's membership, if the people have ONE LINK that takes them directly to the GROUP SITE only, with most of the information there, if not all, then they should not get too lost.

[Sandi Brockway]

Patricia, you need to join the New York state group. It is still in its infancy, a clean slate and you can make sure it is done right. You need to insure it gets designed and laid out properly so it does not end up like this US site that you are complaining about.

All programs start out empty hulls and it is up to the administrators to lay it out and customize it so it makes sense to their clientele. Frankly, I have hate the skin they picked for this one. There are others that are far more attractive. Having dyslexia, I have a serious problem with black on stark white. There are 30% of us with dyslexia, hence the black white issue.

If you like what you see at the sites I remodeled, we can insure that they get implemented at NY. NY is still a virgin, there is not hardly any members. You need to work on getting members into it. I have setup tools at my sites for networking and designing sites. US should just function as springboard and national support only. Your position should be regional, not here, so why the concern over a new US? As far as I can tell, all the states and regions are going Ning because the program is so easy to setup and run. There is no other free social program so easy to setup and run as Ning. To get anything more complicated to grow this fast is not possible at this time. The only other site that has it all is wiserearth and idealist. It would be possible to work within them, but complicated, and no one has taken the initiative.

[Kathy McMahon]

Stan,

I'm not sure if this is what you are asking, but our local sustainability group has a yahoo group, a website and we meet once a month. It is a collection of small towns, so we can easily email and call each other, when the need arises, when the entire group isn't involved. There are also sub-email groups within it for people active in a particular ongoing work.

Is this what you wanted to know?

[Jen Mazer]

Hmmm
Hey all
Speaking of confusing websites-how does one set up groups? I want to add two more groups
to MA website but have no idea what to write when they ask you for the URL? How does one add
pictures if I have none?
Jen Mazer