I'd Rather Be Writing » engagement

Brainstorming Solutions to Volunteer Management/Engagement

Tom Johnson — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:56:27 +0000

I am constantly reflecting on the answer to this question: How can I draw upon the enthusiasm, intelligence, and skill of willing volunteers all around me to take our organization’s site to the next level? This goal mostly relates to my involvement in my organization’s technology blog, which has about 80 volunteer writers.

In my post about what I learned during 2011 as a technical communicator, I wrote:

Community collaboration is extremely tough to pull off. I can’t just assign a volunteer writer a topic and let them run with it. I usually have to either gather the information from a subject matter expert or connect the volunteer with a subject matter expert — and then see them through the process with more hand-holding than I want to provide. Still, community volunteers can generate momentum by the sheer number of assignments I have to follow through with. Overall, I have no idea how to engage community volunteers in an effective way, but I think I can eventually figure a strategy out. (See What I Learned About Tech Comm During 2011.)

In response to this post, Saul Carliner added the following insightful comment:

But the challenges of working with “volunteers,” is one that is rarely mentioned when discussing SME-authored and user-generated documentation. Having had worked with volunteers in a number of sectors over the years–from work-related ones to community ones–the issue of volunteer management is one that still challenges all of them. Incentives and clarity help, but not always in the way intended. Even in areas that have years of experience with volunteers, it’s more of an art than a science. Just because we’ve moved to community-based approaches to documentation and the wikipedia has been successful doesn’t mean that other ventures don’t involve nurturing.

The last sentence particularly stands out. Yes, many social ventures (such as Wikipedia and Digg) have been hugely successful. But that doesn’t mean applying the volunteer model to tech comm is a process or technique we understand. It’s an art, and one that most community managers still struggle to figure out.

The topic isn’t just limited to volunteer engagement. SME-authored documentation, as Saul mentions, also fits into this genre.

In a series of questions I responded to on Ugur Akinci’s blog, I reflected at length on what is the most significant change in the field of technical communication. It fits right in with collaborative efforts and social intelligence. Here’s an excerpt of my response:

QUESTION (3): What is the single most important change that you see in the technical communication sector since you first became a technical communicator?

… The greatest transformation yet to come is to drop the single-author paradigm of technical writing and to embrace the way information flows on the web. … For years help authoring has consisted of one person (or just a few people) writing help material. When content comes from one person, the content is usually limited in perspective, accuracy, and applicability. Writing needs to become much more collaborative, and not just from inside the corporation, but outside as well. Documentation is never finished. When I log off for the day, someone out there may be contributing to the documentation, making it evolve, adding sections, correcting errors, expanding on special cases, and so on.

It’s engaging to come into the office in the morning and review the latest changes to the wiki, to find that someone added a new section, or a new page. We no longer have documentation as static, standalone files that are written in haste by one technical writer and then “finished” as he or she moves to the next project. Documentation is a living, breathing body of information – like the web. The web is in constant flux. It’s full of a whole landscape of people – trolls, spammers, forum champions, lurkers, relentless volunteers, bloggers, programming whizzes. All of these people, like characters in a circus, come together on the same stage, interacting with each other in rich, multifaceted ways. Sometimes these interactions are exciting, other times they’re frustrating. But either way, documentation evolves to become more web-like in the ebb and flow of information.

This ebb and flow of information is what I find most rewarding about technical communication. Information no longer emanates from one source but rather connects into a greater body of people. This is the genius of the web. The web thrives because of this content interaction — one person building on the ideas of another in collaborative, interactive ways. (Read the full interview on Ugur Akinci’s blog.)

Let’s come back to the original question. How can you harness the enthusiasm and talent of volunteers in productive ways? The answer to this question wouldn’t just be a neat technique to enhance productivity; it would change everything about my job.

The problem is not content strategy; it’s content tactics. The strategy is clear: draw upon the talent and enthusiasm of willing volunteers to write high-quality content. The details of how remain a mystery. Let me continue my brainstorm.

Challenges

Several main challenges make this a difficult problem:

Volunteer writers often don’t have the information necessary to write articles.
SMEs with the knowledge often don’t have the interest to write articles.
Content that volunteers write, even if informed, often needs significant editorial processing before it’s ready for publication.
Writing assignments often need more detail before you can assign them to volunteers. If you can only gather this information internally, it makes it difficult to assign to volunteers.
The remote distance between headquarters and volunteers makes collaboration and communication more difficult.

Known Principles that Work

Now that I’ve outlined the challenges, let me also outline what I’ve learned about volunteer engagement:

People are much more likely to accept invitations when invited on a personal level.
People are much more likely to accept invitations when they have a relationship of trust with you.
People need a clear understanding of what you want them to do.
People need deadlines to understand when you expect them to finish their assignments.
People need regular communication so that you can address issues and other concerns that might be obstacles.
Communicating on a personal level, building trust, establishing deadlines, providing detail, etc., takes significant management time.
People need opportunities to pursue their strengths. Not everyone is a creative writer. Many people function better as editors.
People need access to information, people, and meetings to write the content that is expected of them.
Content often goes through successive levels of edits before it’s ready for publication.
People have a limited amount of time to work on articles they are not getting paid for.
People like to feel that their contributions are valued, not wasted.
Coordinating, tracking, commenting, and following up on assignments for scores of volunteers requires an advanced system to manage all of this information.
People often want to get something in return for their volunteering, such as more experience, understanding, improvement, portfolio samples, and more.
People often overestimate their writing abilities.

Formulating a plan

I recognize that my brainstorming and analysis is specific to my own volunteer situation, and one situation may vary dramatically to the next. Hopefully the tactical plan I form may be of interest to others who work in other volunteer situations, even if the details vary. Given the challenges and known principles, what would work well for success?

Here’s are a few potential first steps:

Step 1. Create a body of work that volunteers can do. This means crafting assignments that are important and worthwhile. Creating a body of work may be the most difficult of all steps, as this requires me to add detail and potentially outlines to topics. Sometimes I may only have an idea for a story, or a name to contact, not an actual story in hand. But having a tenuous idea doesn’t work well for volunteers, who may be playing guessing games at what I want. The details of the assignments need to be clearly spelled out. Each writing assignment needs to have a basic level of clarity to be something that users can actually accomplish. Contact points, key messages for the article, length, tone, and other details should be clearly defined.

Step 2. Personally invite volunteers to act. The second step would be to personally invite volunteers to work on the tasks they’re assigned. The invitations should ensure that the writing assignment is a good fit for the volunteer (that is, matching the volunteer’s strengths and interests), that the volunteers have a good idea of what you expect, and the due date.

Step 3. Regularly review, track, and follow-up with assignments. It would be a good idea to review all the items stored in the system (in my case, JIRA) on a daily basis so that I don’t let some assignments languish and become forgotten. Volunteers may run into insurmountable issues and challenges; they may realize the assignment isn’t a good fit for their interests. By following up and checking in regularly with volunteers, I also demonstrate the value and importance of the assignment.

Step 4. Have volunteers edit volunteer writing. This is one of the steps that I’ve never implemented, but it might be good to have volunteers edit other volunteers’ writing. Writing often needs successive levels of editorial review. I could provide some quick comments and feedback, and then either have the volunteer make revisions or pass it to another volunteer to make edits, and then potentially to another volunteer. This way by the time the writing falls on my desk, it’s already to a level that is near publication quality. In some situations, I could ask SMEs to write content and then pass it along to volunteer writers to edit.

Step 5. Communicate regularly. Without regular communication, people lose interest. They quickly drop off. The communication also helps build trust, and people may feel as if they’re learning more from discussions. It’s not possible to build a lively community without regular engagement through e-mail and other online interactions. Perhaps contributing an e-mail a day may go a long way toward building trust and helping volunteers feel that they’re getting a lot out of the experience.

Conclusion

No system works if one doesn’t use it. These five steps aren’t rocket science. I could probably have a decent amount of success implementing them. The problem is maintaining regular activity, sticking with the system week after week, especially when other, higher internal projects get in the way. This is perhaps why breaking the tactics down to even a more concrete, daily to-do list might be a good idea.

I’m interested to hear what strategies you use for managing volunteer writers.

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Avoiding Burnout as a Technical Writer [Collaborative Post]

Tom Johnson — Fri, 06 May 2011 07:12:05 +0000

After I linked to my interview with Kristi Leach about collaborative posts, a reader submitted the following question:

One of the problems I’ve had to combat over the years has been boredom/burnout — that feeling you get either when you’ve been on the same project for too long or a you’re on new project that just feels like exactly what you’ve been working on for years. How do you breath life into work that you’ve done many, many times before?

In my experience, burnout can happen for a number of reasons: the work I’m doing isn’t challenging, the work I’m doing has little meaning, I’m not learning anything new, I’m doing something I’m not passionate about, or the workload I’m shouldering is overwhelming.

In Unhappiness is Good for You, Penelope Trunk says, “According to Leslie Martin, author of the new book, The Longevity Project, stress and anxiety that arise from working hard at something that is engaging and exciting to you is actually a more healthy way to live than in a regular state of cheerfulness.”

Unhappiness and burnout aren’t the same problem, but “working hard at something that is engaging and exciting” probably provides the cure for both. The trick is figuring out how to convert your mundane and boring tasks into work that is engaging and exciting. How do you do that? You do that by continually evolving as a technical writer, by trying new techniques, tools, and methods.

For example, I recently implemented the Semantic Mediawiki extension on my wiki help content. I’m going through all my topics to add metadata using the extension’s syntax, and then I’ll try to make sense of it with various queries. It’s interesting and complex. Sometimes I barely understand what I’m doing. But the possibilities intrigue me.

I’m also writing user awareness articles for a newspaper (if they ever get published). These articles discuss what my organization is doing with technology. I thought the articles would be easy to write, but so far they’re maxing out all my creative skills and proving to be exhausting. Despite the work, it’s precisely this challenge that engages me and keeps my attention.

I’m also trying to figure out how to involve community volunteers in editing and writing content for a technology blog. Community dynamics are tough. Sometimes volunteers get involved in ways that astound me; other times I feel alone. But trying to be a community leader to move forward a mountain of work is challenging, engaging, and as a result, just plain interesting.

To avoid burnout, then, I suggest trying something new, even if it’s really hard. What’s hard also tends to be engaging.

Do you have a response for this reader about avoiding burnout? If so, add it in the comments below.

———-

photo from Flickr

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Why Is It Important for Video Tutorials to Be User-Led?

Tom Johnson — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 07:34:41 +0000

I recently spent 10 days in Florida visiting my family and giving a couple of presentations to the STC-Suncoast and STC-Orlando chapters on blogging. You can hardly take a family of kids to Florida without going to Disneyworld and Seaworld, so we did that as well.

In case you’re unaware of the cost of theme parks, prices are enough to bring on a cold sweat and tremor. (Thanks to some friends, one park was free.) After we completed our four day theme park immersion (Seaworld x 2, Disneyworld, and Busch Gardens), we took life a little more slowly and went to the Fort DeSoto beach.

While my kids were digging in sand and collecting seashells, I dared to ask whether they would rather spend a day at the beach or a day at Disneyworld.

Their answer? Unanimously, they said the beach. I even asked them multiple times on different occasions. Always the same answer: the beach, Dad. We would rather go to the beach and collect seashells.

The interesting question is why. Why do kids prefer the beach to Disneyworld? I think the answer is wrapped up in the phrase “child-led.”

What child-led means

My sister is a proponent of child-led parenting. I was first introduced to the idea when we went on a walk along a trail near Timpanogos Cave in Utah. Rather than pull her kids along or push them in a stroller, my sister preferred to follow her children, allowing them to explore what they wanted and go at their own pace. Given that she has a one and three year old, we moved at about .01 miles per hour.

She later added that child-led parenting doesn’t mean you let your children do whatever they want without rules. Instead, her model of child-led parenting is to allow the children to make decisions and determine their course of action by themselves (to some extent).

Some examples of non-child-led activities might be letting your children watch TV or parading them around rides at a theme park. In both cases, the child is floored by the external stimuli, not making decisions on his or her own but rather sitting back and letting someone else drive the input and thought.

In contrast, on the beach, the activity is much more child-led. The child drives the activity all the way, deciding where to dig in the sand, how deep, whether to build a castle or not. The child decides whether to wade deep or shallow in the water, to run from waves or into waves, whether to dance around or stand still. The child decides what seashells to collect, how many to put in his or her bucket, how to arrange them, which ones to keep, and so on.

In child-led activities, the child makes a ton of decisions about how he or she wants to do an activity. The activity doesn’t drive the child. The child’s choices drive the activity.

If child-led activities are more engaging to children than other types of activities, is there such a thing as user-led documentation? Most written documentation is more or less user-led, because the user must decide which topic to read, how long to read it, and how to navigate the content.

But when it comes to video tutorials, long narrations quickly tire the audience. Why is that? The same reason my kids prefer the beach over Disneyworld: most videos are not user-led.

Should cinema be the focus?

I recently read a good post by Brooks Andrus on combining cinematography with video tutorials. He mentioned incorporating a variety of cinematic techniques to keep the audience’s attention. Brooks writes,

How can we make screencasts more engaging? What can we learn from the masters of visual literacy, cinematographers, about pacing, depth, emotion and visual narrative? These sorts of questions are important to explore if we want people to engage with, learn from and, dare I say, enjoy our screencasts. That’s the mindset I think we need to establish for screencasting. We’re not just recording the screen, we’re telling a story and there is a well established historical record of the art and science behind motion picture narratives.

I agree with Brooks on the importance of story. And I certainly welcome the integration of cinema with screencasting. But no matter how good you make the video — even if you make the video as cool as a Disneyworld ride — your viewer is still going to be bored if the video is not user-led.

The direction we should take with video, then, is not so much moving into the domain of cinema. It should be to make the videos a user-led experience.

Some concrete ideas

Exactly how does one make a user-led video? Here are a few ideas that come to mind.

Present the user with learning options in the middle of the video (branching).
Provide users with a let-me-try experience at the end of the video.
Keep the videos short (30 seconds to 2 minutes) so that you allow the user to click and watch the segment of the video he or she wants.
Require the user to perform some actions during the video or at the end (like homework).
Make the videos into more of a choose-your-own adventure.
Provide periodic quizzes during the video.

User-led is a concept that I’m going to be thinking more about in the upcoming months as I create videos for my documentation projects. If you have any tips or thoughts on creating more of a user-led experience, please let me know.

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Creativity in the Workplace

Tom Johnson — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:57:05 +0000

In previous posts, I’ve explored whether technical writing is boring. Penelope Trunk’s latest post, All advice on how to manage creative people is awful, made me see the topic of workplace boredom in a different light.

Citing research in sociology, Penelope explains that “people who work are happier than people who don’t because people who are employed spend more of their time being creative.” Creativity, then, is an important factor in personal happiness and fulfillment. Most of us know that. But here’s how you measure the degree of creativity in your work. Penelope says,

Mirowskfinds that people who work are happier than people who don’t because people who are employed spend more of their time being creative

How can you tell if you are creative at work? You could just ask yourself if you like your job. It is nearly impossible to like a job if you are not solving problems that are challenging. And if you are doing that, well, that is creative.

For a more scientific gauge, you can look at your cell phone call log. If you routinely call your friends from work, you’re probably not happy at work, according to research from Nathan Eagle, at the Santa Fe Institute.

How can you tell if you are creative at work? You could just ask yourself if you like your job. It is nearly impossible to like a job if you are not solving problems that are challenging. And if you are doing that, well, that is creative.

For a more scientific gauge, you can look at your cell phone call log. If you routinely call your friends from work, you’re probably not happy at work, according to research from Nathan Eagle, at the Santa Fe Institute.

In other words, one measure of creativity at your job is whether you’re solving challenging problems all day. If you’re not presented with these problems, then most likely you’re talking on the phone instead. (Keeping yourself busy with e-mail, Twitter, IM, and other online chatter is the equivalent of talking on the phone.)

Most people consider writing to be a creative endeavor, and in some situations, it certainly is. But creativity is not just associated with writing, art, and the humanities. Penelope broadens creativity to include problem solving too.

In many ways, even though technical writing involves writing, the writing can be less creative than coding a program or creating a user interface. Technical writing can even be less creative than designing the look and feel of the online help that will house the writing. Many times writing procedural information is not creative at all, in fact. Sure, there’s a need to figure out how the application works, but once you’ve done that, merely transcribing how to do tasks in the system can make you start yawning. There are no more problems to solve. It’s mere knowledge transfer. When knowledge transfer is what you spend your day doing, technical writing loses the power of creative fulfillment.

On the flip side, because technical writing poses numerous technical challenges outside of writing, with solutions not always apparent or easy, technical writing can also be engaging. The technical side of our profession is actually what engages me more than the writing, even though I was initially attracted to the idea of writing.

I’ve been thinking about this unexpected reversal a lot lately because I’ve noticed how consuming I find technical challenges in contrast to writing. I’m drawn to problem solving with web issues, especially WordPress sites, to an almost addictive degree. When I’m working on a WordPress project, it consumes me entirely. I can easily sit at the computer for an entire afternoon or evening working on problem after problem, ignoring everything else. Building websites often includes an almost endless supply of problems to solve.

Changing how something looks is only one part of the game. Finding the additional functionality you need, figuring out the best way to organize the content, designing the navigation with usability in mind, configuring new plugins — all of these questions and problems provide engagement with the mind. For me, coming up with solutions is a creative act that surpasses the writing of technical procedures.

Fortunately, writing only takes up a small part of the technical writer’s day, as Shanghai tech writer notes. Once you’ve finished the writing layer of a project, there are countless other technical issues to address, everything from single sourcing the content to designing the online help skin to figuring out relationship tables in Flare. I used to think these tasks were ancillary to the core task of the written content. But now I realize that as far as engagement goes, it’s the other way around. The technical challenges are the rewarding, creative part.

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Students Engaged by Discussion, Not Smart Classrooms

Tom Johnson — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 04:01:49 +0000

All the money spent on making classrooms smart and high tech is basically a waste, since students find these formats boring. What really engages people is discussion and participation. Teachers should strip out all the “smart” gear and reformat the classroom back to the same structure that existed in Athens. (Link courtesy of tc.eserver.org)

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“Lost the Fire – How to Rekindle It” – A Second Response

Tom Johnson — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 01:09:28 +0000

Jayant writes,

I am a technical writer from India. I just moved to the UK and find the scenario very different from India. Here technical writing jobs are not easy to come by – I understand this is due to the recession. I also have found my desire for technical writing waning away a bit. This could be because at my previous office, technical writing had been reduced to merely doing language edits of 500 pages in three days.

How do I rekindle my technical writing fire? Your guidance will be tonic to my current state of mind.

Your question about how to rekindle your enthusiasm is relevant to any career, but perhaps especially with technical writing. Let me reply with a story. At a previous company, one of my colleagues told me she used to be more active in the field, like me, but that her interests changed.

Several times I tried to get her to attend the local STC meetings and events, but without any success. When work ended, she left her technical writer hat at the door. Actually, she’d stopped writing technical documents altogether and had become our designated editor, resigning herself to marking up others’ content only.

Rekindling the fire

Her comment to me one day, “I used to be like you,” made me wonder whether twenty years down the road I too would hold her same attitude, looking at new, enthusiastic writers with a certain apathetic smirk.

The question of how you stay passionate in your field is a universal concern. Even if you’re a best-selling novelist, you probably have days where you wake up and think, I’m so tired of writing. No doubt the president of the United States sometimes finds himself thinking, I wish I could do something else. Maybe fighter pilots also think, on occasion while ascending, Not again, this is getting dull; what else is there for me?

In my initial response to you, I offered him five activities you could do to rekindle your fire. I wrote,

Start a blog and publish at least three posts a week about technical communication.
Follow the conversation threads on TECWR-L (or some other active listserv you like).
Attend one or more technical writing conferences a year (e.g., the Summit in Atlanta).
Get involved in your local STC chapter.
Experiment a bit. Try new things, new deliverables, methods, techniques, etc.

My advice seemed a logical quick fix to career apathy. But you later responded,

I have started trying to post content. But have not found it easy to write on technical communication. I guess it will require constant effort.

I have been following TECHWR-L, though have rarely made any posts.

Your response made me think more about my advice. I thought about what my father once told me when I was in the fourth grade. When I was about 10, one day I came home and complained to my dad that what I was learning at school was boring. I can’t remember the subject details –- probably math or social sciences.

My father made a big deal about my comment. He said (and would say on other occasions), “It’s not the subject that’s boring, Tommy. It’s the teacher!” That idea has stuck with me all my life. It suggests that you can potentially be enthusiastically engaged in anything, if you look at it from the right angle. Even if you’re nothing more than a bus driver, perhaps you can become fascinated with traffic flows, weather conditions, routing patterns, social interactions in public spheres — whatever.

Still, the question is how exactly you do this. With some reflection, I’ve come to a conclusion. Reading is a trigger for thought, but in my experience, writing is the core activity that produces engagement. So I would now change my advice to you as follows: To rekindle your passion for what you do, write.

The advice is simple, but everything else hangs on it. Writing involves thinking, analyzing, experimenting, researching, reading. Writing is the one key activity that gives rise to everything else. It doesn’t matter whether you post on a blog, keep a private journal, or write articles for a magazine or journal –- writing itself is what keeps your mind active and engaged. It gives rise to enthusiasm.

But you find it hard to write about technical communication, you say? That’s because you’re not writing about what’s relevant to you. Find an issue or trend in the field that you struggle with, or that you’re curious about. Read about it, think about it, ask yourself questions about it, and write out the answers. Eventually your muse will begin to speak.

When you blog about it, others will respond. Comments will enrich your thoughts and require your response. All this will contribute to your level of engagement. Writing lends itself to new ideas and transforms your world views. It encourages experimentation and evaluation. The mere act of writing leads to a more active involvement with life in general. This is probably why you became a writer in the first place.

You may not feel the muse speak initially. That’s okay. Keep writing and reading until you find some momentum. When it does occur, everything else will follow. You’ll naturally get involved in local groups such as the STC. You’ll naturally begin to follow listservs that interest you. You’ll naturally be asking your employer for funding to attend conferences.

To jump start your writing engine, try doing the following five activities:

Listen to a podcast, and then write a post reviewing the main ideas you hear.
Read a few articles from STC’s Intercom magazine and write a post in response to something that intrigues you.
Read a tech comm blog and write a post in response to something that caches your eye.
Try something new with your deliverables and write about it.
Attend an STC event (chapter meeting, webinar, conference) and write about your experience.

Let me know how it goes.