🌿The Spore

Brought to you by the team at Organizational Mycology

🤔 Something we've been thinking about

Appreciation in volunteering

Think about a time when you’ve done volunteer work. Maybe you helped out at your kid’s school, or spent some time working with a local nonprofit that you liked. Maybe you helped clean up after an event. What made you want to do it? What kept you doing it? What made you stop doing it?

As we start up a new community-building project with an open source software organization, we’ve been thinking a lot about the role of appreciation in keeping people around as volunteers. Specifically, we’ve been talking about how appreciation (and how people seek it or do not seek it) is a very personal thing: For some, meaningful appreciation comes in the form of interpersonal, social interaction. A passing shout-out in a weekly newsletter, a private message from a co-volunteer or leader, or a genuine thank-you from a member of the community you’re serving can be more valuable than any monetary reward. For others appreciation is most meaningful when it’s etched into artifacts: Physical rewards, gift cards, trophies, plaques etc. 

And still others don’t seek appreciation, avoiding recognition as much as possible and maintaining a motivation that is instead focused on the work product (e.g., the technology you're building or the trees you're planting). Some open source software developers, for example, are just really passionate about the technology and the opportunity to work on it is enough to keep them around. Other volunteers may stick around because they like being part of a community and having opportunities to socialize.

In short, some people seek appreciation and draw meaning from their work based on how they’re appreciated. Others actively try to avoid being overtly and publicly appreciated. So when trying to build a system for appreciation in your volunteer-based organization, it is important to personalize it to the needs of your community members. There is little value in “automating” appreciation; the gratitude needs to be heart-felt and connect with the individual. Consider:

• How do your volunteers want to be appreciated? This could be at the individual level at first, but there are likely commonalities in how and why people feel appreciated. 
• What ways could you make sure that the folks you’re working with personally feel like they are valued? 
• How does the “culture” – the underlying system of rewards and appreciation – account for the diversity of appreciation preferences? 

One reason that appreciation is so important is to help your volunteers avoid burnout. Research suggests that people often burn out when they don’t clearly see the products of their work and how those products are valuable to society (e.g., a worker on an assembly line never seeing the final product they are contributing to), leaving them feeling as if their work is not valuable. Helping people to see the larger picture, such as reminding them that they are contributing to a greater good, is a key way of helping them avoid burnout. 

What's more, volunteer communities that foster a culture of appreciation can catalyze monumental efforts to address wicked challenges. We've seen this across our work in open communities, and Jonah wrote a bit about this awhile ago.

So... How do you appreciate your volunteers? What makes you feel appreciated?

🤔 Something we've been working on

EOSS Community Call Resources

We’ve continued hosting CZI’s EOSS community calls. Our resources from those calls can be found in one location on Github. Please take a look and let us know if you have any contributions to make on these topics. We’d be glad to hear from you. 

• Managing an Open Source Project: A checklist of things to consider - July 2024
• 10 Simple Rules for Leadership Without Formal Authority – August 2024
• Measuring and Assessing Open Source Project Impact and Community Health – September 2024

Stay tuned, we’ve got more resources forthcoming! 

The Organizational Mycology Team Volunteering