Volunteer Staff for side projects

Do you ever recruit volunteer "staff" or "helpers" to assist with mini-projects around the forum? For example, if you add a blog to your website, do you look for a member who will help upkeep it? (I mean, as administrators, we can only manage so many things at once.)

I often try to find helpers for different little projects, but I always have a hard time keeping them motivated and interested in their tasks. At first they are very enthusiastic, interested, and excited, but then they start to slip: they miss deadlines, their quality of work diminishes, and then it all becomes a failure.

Just wondering how you keep additional volunteers on-board and interested. :shrug:

 

I ask all of the time. Unfortunately, it doesn't work all of the time. The others lose interest since they don't have as much of a stake in what is going on with the site. Although, the ones that keep going with the participation and assistance usually come out as forum leaders and folks that you can depend on long term.

 

Well I'm new to the group but i want to voice my opinion... (If you don't mind)

At my site I'm just starting to this I'm trying to swallow a lot of work and now looking towards having some of my staff do some of the housekeeping or changes. Which is starting to work out on my side...

But on the other side you got to have people that you can trust to a degree to...

So Nick I'm learning along right with you... I've got a small Dodge/Cummins tech site and it growing rapidily in it own ways and as for a single person to handle all the responsibilities it huge at times...

 

I tried, but my members lack knowledge or dedication. Nowadays I do everything myself, it takes very much time.

 

There is an interesting feature coming out for ip.content where I believe a 'group' can be assigned to maintain it, and it does not need to be a moderator. That group can promote discussions to articles and manage comments *I think*.

Moderators are fairly special and privy to many things, so they are not changed often, but this new group that can promote articles can be rotated out at any time. At least that is my current theory.

So if someone wants to help they can join the group and if they are not active enough, they can be rotated out of the group.

As far as motivating, that is more of a management issue. Given the right encouraging words many things are possible and for me that is usually the best approach. But as of late I'm a little burned out so the times when I can make those kinds of pep talks are becoming farther apart. Staying away from forums seems to work, but that proves to be difficult.