Horner Transcript 8
From OER Commons
Interview with FHSST Founder Mark Horner
Movie 8
What helps to keep volunteers motivated?
I think to keep volunteers interested you need to simply reduce the technical expertise required if possible, unless you’re looking for volunteers with specific expertise. You need to try to keep it social, keep it focused, but you also need to keep the whole project dynamic. Because as volunteers, they are volunteering their time, and they don't want to write the same sorts of material for hundreds and hundreds of hours on end. There needs to be some evolution, so having goals and small projects which are attainable in relatively short time scales I think helps just with the motivation factor. And you can break a big project down into lots of small goals. It also gives you more focus as a project so I think that can really help with volunteers.
But it is difficult, and every volunteer is in it for-- they have different motivation, and it's difficult to accommodate that. I think you've just got to accept that has their own motivation and you shouldn't assume that the reason you do something is the reason that anybody else is doing the same project.
I think there's a much wider range in motivation than people might realize.
Were there other ways you tried to motivate volunteers?
We ran three different competitions, all looking for different types of material. We thought we could maybe get people to contribute if there was a prize on the line.
The first competition was to write a specific section for a book that was missing. The second competition was to write an essay on some real world application of something that was in the curriculum. The final competition was an editing one.
They weren't very successful, and I think a lot of that has to do with advertising. If you want a competition to be successful you really have to advertise quite widely. We didn't have an advertising budget, we only really had a prize money budget. In the future we should really factor in some real advertising money.
