Technology Volunteers Volume 2

Good technology volunteers have been and will continue to be an absolute must for our department as the Church continues to minister to tens of thousands of people locally and hundred of thousands (if not millions) across the world, bringing Jesus to people by using technology. We simply cannot efficiently function without them, as the current work load and the far reaching vision of what we want to do in the future is far too high for the available staff. I’ve discussed the kinds of traits we look for in good volunteers, and I want to examine what a good volunteer looks like practically, but before I do that, I need to show what a good volunteer does NOT look like.

Before coming on staff, I volunteered in the software development here for about 6 years as our church grew from around a hundred or so to the 5000 range. As I’ve said I’ve seen many volunteers come and go, and I’ve had my fair share of frustrations with people who had either incorrect attitudes or intentions.
As I’ve reflected on some volunteers who haven’t work out, I can generally classify them into two basic groups.

1. The first group I call Super Software Consultants. These are people who generally aren’t interested in doing any actual work but more interested in telling us what we are doing wrong and what direction we should be going (which inevitably is not the direction we are currently going). They normally have a pet technology that far exceeds other pet technologies and usually instruct us that we should re-create everything we’ve already done using that technology, this apparently has the effect of making us a world class development shop (since we are primarily an open source shop, the most common type of pet technology that has been pushed on us like this have the words “dot” and “net” in the name). In the past, I’ve normally suggested that if we would be better off with their pet technology then by all means they should go ahead and implement that and let us know when they are done. I usually get a less then excited look on their face, followed by reasons why they are too busy to do that (usually because work is too crazy) but that we should definitely implement those changes ourselves. Normally, they didn’t come back, I guess work got crazy.
2. The second group of people (I don’t have a formal name for this group) are people who really have a desire to help, but underestimate the amount of time it requires to effectively do so. My frustration with someone like this has been the time it takes away from myself and other staff/volunteers to bring them up to speed on our software systems, only to have them never come back after the second meeting because other things in life got too busy. I admit that this frustration was partially my fault, as I was almost always very optimistic when I saw somebody come in who was excited to help and I didn’t take the time to really determine if this person had the time and the skills to do what was needed. I even had a period of time a while back that I became jaded with other volunteers as this happened to me several times, but with the arrival of several volunteers who have worked out great, I’m not nearly as jaded, but I am definitely far more cautious.

So these two types of “volunteers” have definitely caused us some headaches over the years, and we’ve made some changes in how we approach integrating volunteers into our development process to avoid the frustrations that come with dealing with these situations.

I do want to stress thought, that more importantly, we have some awesome volunteers that definitely do NOT fall into these categories and who are great examples of an awesome tech development volunteer.

I will take a look at what makes a great volunteer in the next volume.