A Little Mistake That Killed My Community

You need to keep recruiting volunteers, even if you have enough.

Almost 6 years ago I used to be involved with UKT, a community for fans of online gaming. It was a strong community with thousands of registered members and a good number of volunteer helpers.

After 4 years of steady growth, the community collapsed within 6 months. The reason was we stopped recruiting volunteers. We felt we had enough. We stopped recruiting, training and even trying to properly motivate the volunteers we had.

Volunteers don’t work for free, they work for fun. Which means they will volunteer their time until they find something more fun to do with their time. If your volunteers are young, this can be a major problem during the summer.

We didn’t spot the problem until it was too late. A few volunteers left over two months. The remaining volunteers worked harder to cover. The extra efforts without rewards took it’s toll and they left too. The result was a sudden stop to the fast-paced content.

Volunteers wont stick around forever. You need to continually recruit more.

Comments

[Kai Chan Vong]

Interesting post. My observations with sites like UKT, is that they fall when there isn't a community manager around keeping things rolling out.

It doesn't have to be a thrive of volunteers - that helps, because user driven content (like Digg) is the way forward...

With gaming sites like ESReality and SoGamed, there was either an individual that was either extremely passionate about the content and direction of the site, thus taking on that role. Or there was someone paid, and that was their job to hit certain targets and maintain a number of writers.

SK were very ruthless with their scheme, any dead wood and they would chuck you out faster than you could say "pretsil-snacken!"

[Stuart Foster]

Realizing that you have volunteers instead of paid workers in a community is vital in your approach. The recruitment process can't end but if your community grows to a certain point you may want to consider hiring another non-volunteer. Would that have worked in this situation?

[Tim Fountain]

I don't think the problem with UKT was that we stopped recruiting volunteers (you can still see the 'posters wanted' message on the site now, and it was there for a long time before the end).

As Kai said, sites like UKT generally have one person doing the bulk of the content and driving things forward. Usually this is the person (or people) who created the site initially. I think UKT was unusual in that this wasn't the case, and it relied on volunteers from the start. I could do all the day-to-day stuff, but I just wasn't involved enough in the community to be able to churn out the content.

In my experience getting volunteers isn't that difficult - being 'staff' is an easy way for community members to elevate their status. But finding a volunteer who can give up enough time to fill that core-contributor role is difficult, since there is quite a time commitment required with little reward.