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Annual Report 2024/Fail fest: Volunteer engagement – a challenge

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Community
2024

In this fail fest, we focus on our ambitions to involve the volunteer community in organizing activities, including photo competitions, which we did not manage to fully implement.

One of our goals for 2024 was to engage volunteers in organizing the photo competitions Wiki Loves Earth, which focuses on Sweden's protected nature, and Wiki Loves Monuments, which focuses on our built cultural heritage. We saw a need to develop both clearer tasks for how volunteers could support the office in coordinating the national competition and, above all, how to organize local activities and events connected to the competition, such as photo safaris to document cultural or natural heritage in a specific geographic area, or edit-a-thons to add the images to Wikipedia articles, or entirely different ideas. This work was started but has not been completed, and in this fail fest, we analyze what remains to be done to reach our goals and how we can work with volunteer engagement in the association in general. There are also other activities under the Community Support umbrella that we think should be possible to run with volunteer involvement; we address this in Story: Investing more in community support.

Traditionally, Wikimedia Sverige has managed the Wiki Loves competitions, and 2024 was no exception, despite the initial intention to delegate parts of the work to the community. This was due to the fact that the required documentation and management of the competition activities were more extensive than we had initially estimated. When it comes to the Wiki Loves competitions, and other activities as well, we need to explain the tasks we would like to delegate in a way that engages volunteers and ensures they understand what is expected of them. At the same time, a level of flexibility is needed so those who want to organize activities differently than we have done in the past are not excluded.

The staff has struggled to clearly describe which of our activities could particularly benefit from volunteer help and how to communicate the need for support, including the level of commitment it would entail. We know that there are many ideas within the community that could be implemented if given a chance, and if people were aware that it is possible.

On our website, we do not clearly showcase opportunities for engagement. For several years, we have had "Here's how you can help as a volunteer!" sections on our project pages, but with limited success.

There are also challenges related to our funding, making it difficult to invite volunteers into our externally funded projects. Relying on volunteer contributions in these projects poses risks, as they must deliver high-quality results within a limited timeframe, and if a volunteer decides to withdraw, it could jeopardize our ability to secure funding in the future. At the same time, our internally funded projects must offer both concrete and clear tasks while also allowing volunteers to bring in their own ideas.

Future plans

We need to further consider the best ways of presenting opportunities for volunteer engagement. We do not make it clear enough on our website and project pages that people can get involved, and many in the community do not know how, or even that they can contribute in the first place. We need to make it easier and more appealing.

This means improving how we identify activities and projects where people can participate. However, it is a delicate balance between inviting volunteers (and others) and ensuring we have the resources to support them. We must recognize that it takes time to support and mentor those who engage as volunteers, and we need to provide training and other forms of support along the way. We believe this is a valuable investment, as it has the potential to foster innovation within the organization, create local engagement and ownership, strengthen our societal impact, and reduce the workload on office staff, allowing them to focus on tasks that are harder to manage with volunteers.

The recently implemented CRM system is also a key component in this. The system enables us to engage, track, and support volunteers systematically while mapping skills and interests to improve leadership development and participation. The CRM system also provides new opportunities for effective engagement with members and donors, ensuring long-term commitment and increasing financial sustainability. Our long-term goal, as described in our guidelines for association engagement, is to transform passive members into active contributors and, ultimately, into leaders. The system will also allow us to better analyze who is engaging with the organization, in what roles, and to what extent. Additionally, it will help identify those we are missing and whom we should actively seek to engage. We will use these insights to further develop our annual diversity report.

There is a well-established tradition within the association where volunteers propose ideas and initiatives, and the staff then works out how to support them. There are already existing structures for this process, which we can build upon going forward.