A group of people at my work involved in FIRST have done a great job of getting the company to donate to FIRST. We sponsor many teams with employees who mentor, award FIRST Scholarships, and are now sponsoring an event 2022 Kentwood District. Our work gives us a Volunteer Time Off Day (VTO) to spend one working day out of the office volunteering. We want to fill the event with Volunteers to justify the event but many people seem hesitant it seems for the following reasons:
Signup complexity
Feeling unqualified
Not realizing they need to signup early
Unsure of their role/variety of roles they could get
Thinking they need to signup for 2 days.
Has anyone fought through these challenges? Anyone have any ideas to spread excitement around the desolate office with remote working options?
I’ve run into this a bit too, although we don’t have VTO. The early signup seems to be the biggest obstacle; when people hear that they need to sign up in December for a volunteer gig in late March/early April, they tend to say “oh, I don’t know what my availability is that far out”. I’ve tried in the past to re-gather enthusiasm closer to the event if they’re still short on volunteers, but with little success.
We do a big lunch meeting every October for anyone who’s interested in FIRST to learn more; before COVID it would be in-person with lunch provided. Our Regional Director or Senior Mentor would come by and give a little presentation, and employee mentors would talk about their experiences and do Q&A. Our priority at that meeting is recruiting mentors and folks to review grant apps, which is why we do it in October. It’s been pretty successful at that, but much less successful for recruiting volunteers. But if you’re primarily focused on volunteers, you might have some luck holding something similar, closer to the volunteer sign-up period. And go over the hesitations you listed so that everyone understands.
It’s not something I’ve dealt with myself, but perhaps you can work with the volunteer coordinator and find some task that you all volunteer for together as a group? That is, if the challenge is that people don’t want to use a confusing signup system on their own, in this black box where they don’t know what roles they might get, can you preempt some of that by connecting with the VC ahead of time, figuring out what roles would make sense (ideally something you could do together as a group, at least for people who don’t have a preference for some specific other role), and getting that all sorted out up front? You’d need to then each put in into the volunteer registration system to make it “official”, but there wouldn’t be that uncertainty.
I think it being something you can all do together might help with that “spreading excitement” to some degree as well. It may be trickier to find things if you don’t think most people want to sign up for 2 days, but most events could use a lot of help for field setup or teardown, for instance, and that’s the kind of thing definitely conducive to you all working together as a group (even one signing up at the last minute), as often setup tasks get parceled to groups of people anyway to try to get everything put together in parallel, and usually don’t need technical qualifications beyond knowing how to use a screwdriver and zip ties. Your VC may have even better ideas than that though, on other tasks that can be helpful to have a group for that’s only guaranteed for 1 day.
I will say from an event side, having a ton of volunteers who only sign up for 1 day of a 2 day event makes it a logistical/training nightmare. Having worked champs fields that had large corporate sponsors fill the field with their volunteers for one day, and only one day, made it harder on the rest of the volunteer staff, who then had to cover the other days, retrain new volunteers, etc. So while it’s awesome that you are trying to get them to sign up, and I understand the challenges associated with that, please realize this can actually make an event worse for the other volunteers and teams.
That being said, there are also a bunch of districts/regions that have gone to remote judging. It only requires a couple hours a night leading up to the event, and so this may be a better option for you to have them look for some of those opportunities, or a FIRST Tech Challenge event, which is usually only a one day event. Once they are hooked, a 2 day event usually isn’t an issue!
Your best bet is to get the VC involved. You can bring them in for a 30 minute meeting to talk about the different positions available, the commitment needed, and even help people get registered on the FIRST site right there! I know we’ve done that in the past with large sponsors to help get their employees in as volunteers, and it’s worked fairly well.