Thanks for doing this! Do you have any advice for EA group organizers (especially university groups), based on your experience with operations at other kinds of organizations? Areas I’m curious about include:
How can EA groups grow their teams and activities while maintaining good team coordination and management?
What relatively low-cost things can leadership do, if any, that go far in improving new team members’ (especially volunteers’) morale/engagement/commitment/initiative?
How can experienced EA groups best provide organizational support for new/small ones?
Fellow group organizer here! (and former uni club leader, though not for an EA group) Honestly I don’t think there were that many specific skills I learned from operations that helped me in group organizing, but rather it was the general operations mindset, which to me involves: a) noticing when things aren’t running smoothly as they can be (for me this is feels like a special kind of stress, and if I’m not careful, my brain directs the blame towards other people involved in the system rather than the system itself), and b) trying things, whether that be new management structures, different software tools, etc. In particular I’ve found that familiarity with tools like Airtable, Slack, and Asana has been helpful for group organizing but you can probably find resources for that on the EA Hub.
I’ll answer the rest of your questions separately.
How can experienced EA groups best provide organizational support for new/small ones?
I consider myself a new organizer so I don’t have much to add here other than a) one-on-ones, and b) sharing systems etc. that work for you (e.g. for tracking attendance, advertising, workshops). I think every new group is going to have different questions and different needs so I suspect there’s not a one-size-fits-all formula, which is why I think one-on-ones with organizers can be especially helpful, since you can gauge their bottlenecks and help brainstorm solutions.
What relatively low-cost things can leadership do, if any, that go far in improving new team members’ (especially volunteers’) morale/engagement/commitment/initiative?
A few things come to mind:
1) Be an understanding, compassionate human. It sounds easy but I (and I think many others) actually suck at this once you bring important projects with deadlines into the mix. If someone doesn’t do things on time, it’s easy for me to get frustrated with them, but as a student leader I wish I would have reached out to people who were dropping balls and actually tried to work with them to see where they were at and how I could help rather than assuming they were lazy or disorganized. This sounds higher-cost but I think it actually saves time in the long-run if you can set up your team members to run things themselves without management having to pick up all the dropped balls.
2) Provide channels for feedback (and actually act on it). Whether that’s a time during your meetings, a channel in Slack, or an anonymous suggestion box (physical or virtual), I think one of the biggest morale killers is built up resentment about a thing being done less-than-optimally when no one seems interested in fixing that thing.
I think it’s worth noting that from my experiences in volunteer management, I expect to have a certain number of people who join and then drop-off/ghost after a while. (For me it’s almost exactly 10% within the first month or so each time, and then the number goes towards 25-50% over a year depending on the situation.) This is completely normal, especially in university as people go on to explore other clubs or take on internships or get hit with heavier coursework. Don’t stress over these people: it’s better for them to be honest with you about their commitments than to push them to take on more responsibility than they have time for.
I recall hearing from Alex Barry at the EA Summit a couple years ago who, at the time, was leading Cambridge EA (iirc) and they had an absolutely incredible rate of engagement from volunteer organizers/members contributing time to the EA group’s events and activities. And huge numbers of them. IIRC, he said the key for them was to have one basic requirement: the organizers had to commit to checking and responding to Slack daily. That way, they’d know write away if someone didn’t have time to keep working on something, and they’d quickly find someone else to do it.
How can EA groups grow their teams and activities while maintaining good team coordination and management?
Short answer: Asana. Long answer: Clearly define everyone’s roles and responsibilities and delegate wherever you can. As you get bigger you’ll probably want to have something like a traditional management structure, where e.g. the President oversees four committees, and each committee is run by one person, rather than one giant executive board. That way the President doesn’t have to keep track of every little thing that’s happening. This works best if you have a lot of people who are interested in helping out and are actually responsible.
Also: be realistic about what you can accomplish. If you don’t have enough people/capacity to do a thing well, it’s not worth trying to do the thing mediocre-ly.
I’ll have a go at adding some more ideas for #2. (Similarly to Martin, I don’t feel like this is my area of expertise and I’m sure there are others in the EA community who’ve thought about thisway more than me, but here goes for a try: )
In an organisation that has paid staff one important thing for commitment would be making sure people are compensated well. While volunteers are unpaid and to a large extent doing it for the impact of the role, I wonder whether there are easy-ish ways to optimise the non-money benefits that volunteers are getting out of the role – e.g. skills, connections and so on. I guess one way to do this would be just to pay particular attention to volunteers “as clients” when doing the group’s normal community-building activities. Alternatively, are there benefits that can be provided specifically to volunteers – like maybe connections to more established people doing similar work to the volunteer’s role, or social activities specifically for the volunteer team? (Though those probably aren’t low-cost, now that I think about it!)
Martin’s idea of a retreat could be good for the engagement goal too – at EA Cambridge, where I’m a volunteer, there was a committee retreat one year. To be honest I don’t remember what the main goals of the event were, but I think one benefit was helping me feel more engaged/committed in the committee that year.
The other main area I can think of that might help is ensuring that volunteers have plenty of ownership and space to make meaningful decisions and innovate (and that things stay that way as the team grows), both so that people feel a sense of responsibility and are more committed, and just to help the work be interesting. Like, where possible, delegating an area of responsibility, a problem or a sizeable project rather than the implementation of a specific solution; and ensuring that volunteers know what the extent of their freedom to change things is.
I don’t have any experience with organizing EA groups at a university so I’m not the best person to answer these questions but I’ll do my best.
Regarding bullet point #2, I think there are two things that are worth doing. First, praise them publicly and privately about their work. If they contributed to something that went well (such as an event), then public acknowledge their effort to the larger community and thank them. Volunteers (and operations folks as a whole) do a lot of thankless work that is largely seen as “easy” by a lot of people so having leaders acknowledge them is helpful. I also think you can praise them privately as well with a simple thank-you email or simply tell them face-to-face (or virtually these days). I often like to tell any operations assistants or volunteers that their work matters. I like to explain the causal link between the successful completion of their duties and the end goal. For example, if the volunteer doesn’t create a template for the invite, then this delays the invites for the event and this puts the event in jeopardy. I think volunteers don’t have a keen sense of how their work impacts the end goal of a project because they don’t have the birds-eye view of the project like leaders do; they don’t possess the ability to see the causal link between their work and the end goal. It’s important for leaders to clearly draw that line for them so they understand how their work integrates with the larger picture and hopefully, how integral their work is to the project.
Regarding bullet point #3, I think having publicly available resources is a good idea. For example, at CHAI, we use Notion to document all of our internal logistics so any new member can familiarize themselves with our inner workings. If you haven’t already, perhaps writing a set of guidelines for new/small organizations is useful. You can write a guide on organizing events, recruitment, marketing, etc and all of the different aspects when it comes to running an EA university organization. Also, documentation of your “missteps” is valuable. What lessons did you learn along the way as you organized events on campus? What former processes did you use before settling on your current one and why did the former one “break”? This gives new/small orgs an insight as to how to think about their own internal systems as they begin to grow and can learn from your previous mistakes and know what to avoid.
Another thing you can do is hold small retreats (virtually for now, obviously) where you invite leaders from new/small orgs and hold talks about various aspects of running an organization.
[1/2]
Thanks for doing this! Do you have any advice for EA group organizers (especially university groups), based on your experience with operations at other kinds of organizations? Areas I’m curious about include:
How can EA groups grow their teams and activities while maintaining good team coordination and management?
What relatively low-cost things can leadership do, if any, that go far in improving new team members’ (especially volunteers’) morale/engagement/commitment/initiative?
How can experienced EA groups best provide organizational support for new/small ones?
Fellow group organizer here! (and former uni club leader, though not for an EA group) Honestly I don’t think there were that many specific skills I learned from operations that helped me in group organizing, but rather it was the general operations mindset, which to me involves: a) noticing when things aren’t running smoothly as they can be (for me this is feels like a special kind of stress, and if I’m not careful, my brain directs the blame towards other people involved in the system rather than the system itself), and b) trying things, whether that be new management structures, different software tools, etc. In particular I’ve found that familiarity with tools like Airtable, Slack, and Asana has been helpful for group organizing but you can probably find resources for that on the EA Hub.
I’ll answer the rest of your questions separately.
I consider myself a new organizer so I don’t have much to add here other than a) one-on-ones, and b) sharing systems etc. that work for you (e.g. for tracking attendance, advertising, workshops). I think every new group is going to have different questions and different needs so I suspect there’s not a one-size-fits-all formula, which is why I think one-on-ones with organizers can be especially helpful, since you can gauge their bottlenecks and help brainstorm solutions.
A few things come to mind:
1) Be an understanding, compassionate human. It sounds easy but I (and I think many others) actually suck at this once you bring important projects with deadlines into the mix. If someone doesn’t do things on time, it’s easy for me to get frustrated with them, but as a student leader I wish I would have reached out to people who were dropping balls and actually tried to work with them to see where they were at and how I could help rather than assuming they were lazy or disorganized. This sounds higher-cost but I think it actually saves time in the long-run if you can set up your team members to run things themselves without management having to pick up all the dropped balls.
2) Provide channels for feedback (and actually act on it). Whether that’s a time during your meetings, a channel in Slack, or an anonymous suggestion box (physical or virtual), I think one of the biggest morale killers is built up resentment about a thing being done less-than-optimally when no one seems interested in fixing that thing.
I think it’s worth noting that from my experiences in volunteer management, I expect to have a certain number of people who join and then drop-off/ghost after a while. (For me it’s almost exactly 10% within the first month or so each time, and then the number goes towards 25-50% over a year depending on the situation.) This is completely normal, especially in university as people go on to explore other clubs or take on internships or get hit with heavier coursework. Don’t stress over these people: it’s better for them to be honest with you about their commitments than to push them to take on more responsibility than they have time for.
I recall hearing from Alex Barry at the EA Summit a couple years ago who, at the time, was leading Cambridge EA (iirc) and they had an absolutely incredible rate of engagement from volunteer organizers/members contributing time to the EA group’s events and activities. And huge numbers of them. IIRC, he said the key for them was to have one basic requirement: the organizers had to commit to checking and responding to Slack daily. That way, they’d know write away if someone didn’t have time to keep working on something, and they’d quickly find someone else to do it.
Short answer: Asana. Long answer: Clearly define everyone’s roles and responsibilities and delegate wherever you can. As you get bigger you’ll probably want to have something like a traditional management structure, where e.g. the President oversees four committees, and each committee is run by one person, rather than one giant executive board. That way the President doesn’t have to keep track of every little thing that’s happening. This works best if you have a lot of people who are interested in helping out and are actually responsible.
Also: be realistic about what you can accomplish. If you don’t have enough people/capacity to do a thing well, it’s not worth trying to do the thing mediocre-ly.
I’ll have a go at adding some more ideas for #2. (Similarly to Martin, I don’t feel like this is my area of expertise and I’m sure there are others in the EA community who’ve thought about thisway more than me, but here goes for a try: )
In an organisation that has paid staff one important thing for commitment would be making sure people are compensated well. While volunteers are unpaid and to a large extent doing it for the impact of the role, I wonder whether there are easy-ish ways to optimise the non-money benefits that volunteers are getting out of the role – e.g. skills, connections and so on. I guess one way to do this would be just to pay particular attention to volunteers “as clients” when doing the group’s normal community-building activities. Alternatively, are there benefits that can be provided specifically to volunteers – like maybe connections to more established people doing similar work to the volunteer’s role, or social activities specifically for the volunteer team? (Though those probably aren’t low-cost, now that I think about it!)
Martin’s idea of a retreat could be good for the engagement goal too – at EA Cambridge, where I’m a volunteer, there was a committee retreat one year. To be honest I don’t remember what the main goals of the event were, but I think one benefit was helping me feel more engaged/committed in the committee that year.
The other main area I can think of that might help is ensuring that volunteers have plenty of ownership and space to make meaningful decisions and innovate (and that things stay that way as the team grows), both so that people feel a sense of responsibility and are more committed, and just to help the work be interesting. Like, where possible, delegating an area of responsibility, a problem or a sizeable project rather than the implementation of a specific solution; and ensuring that volunteers know what the extent of their freedom to change things is.
I don’t have any experience with organizing EA groups at a university so I’m not the best person to answer these questions but I’ll do my best.
Regarding bullet point #2, I think there are two things that are worth doing. First, praise them publicly and privately about their work. If they contributed to something that went well (such as an event), then public acknowledge their effort to the larger community and thank them. Volunteers (and operations folks as a whole) do a lot of thankless work that is largely seen as “easy” by a lot of people so having leaders acknowledge them is helpful. I also think you can praise them privately as well with a simple thank-you email or simply tell them face-to-face (or virtually these days). I often like to tell any operations assistants or volunteers that their work matters. I like to explain the causal link between the successful completion of their duties and the end goal. For example, if the volunteer doesn’t create a template for the invite, then this delays the invites for the event and this puts the event in jeopardy. I think volunteers don’t have a keen sense of how their work impacts the end goal of a project because they don’t have the birds-eye view of the project like leaders do; they don’t possess the ability to see the causal link between their work and the end goal. It’s important for leaders to clearly draw that line for them so they understand how their work integrates with the larger picture and hopefully, how integral their work is to the project.
Regarding bullet point #3, I think having publicly available resources is a good idea. For example, at CHAI, we use Notion to document all of our internal logistics so any new member can familiarize themselves with our inner workings. If you haven’t already, perhaps writing a set of guidelines for new/small organizations is useful. You can write a guide on organizing events, recruitment, marketing, etc and all of the different aspects when it comes to running an EA university organization. Also, documentation of your “missteps” is valuable. What lessons did you learn along the way as you organized events on campus? What former processes did you use before settling on your current one and why did the former one “break”? This gives new/small orgs an insight as to how to think about their own internal systems as they begin to grow and can learn from your previous mistakes and know what to avoid.
Another thing you can do is hold small retreats (virtually for now, obviously) where you invite leaders from new/small orgs and hold talks about various aspects of running an organization.