OpenOakland

Elected to the Community Organizer role.

My Role
Advocate for members.
Prototype a remote onboarding experience.
Codify Design Principles for the organization.

Results
Increased member retention.
Decreased pain points.
Increased number of first timers.

Qualitative member research through onboarding.

I met with newcomers every week at a early start time. I would explain how the Code for America brigade functioned and in return would hear where people were coming from and what they hoped to get from becoming a member. Often they would share about their experience within their field of expertise or speak to what they would like to learn.

Increase newcomer retention.

Volunteerism has a high churn rate. Over the course of my tenure we saw:

23%

of our membership return more than 10 times.

12%

attended between 5-10 meetings.

65%

attended fewer than 5 times.

With this in mind I looked at the informal onboarding interview research, and I corroborated it with survey responses from longstanding members on what kept them coming back. Top feedback:

1. Be a part of the community and give back.

2. Learn about our neighbors.

3. Grow my skills in service of Oakland.

We implemented changes in procedure and I prototyped a remote onboarding experience.

Serve our stakeholders.

OpenOakland provides different things for different types of stakeholders who engage with our community. As we understand who we are serving we can deliver better information and programming to each of them, leading to better outcomes. Through engagement with OpenOakland we define goals and create a path to achievement.

As the first point of contact I got a good grasp of who wanted to join our organization and why. This feedback resulted in numerous additions to the onboarding presentation slide deck. Using this information combined with further research I assembled a stakeholder community visualization board enabling us to deliver better programming and information to all.

Ensure that projects are in service of the community.

My team built procedures that would ensure that all projects were serving Oakland. We looked at what would make it easy for new attendees to understand what was needed and how they could apply their skills and gain experience.

Make it easy for newcomers to plug into projects.

Volunteers are typically with the organization for 3 months. The sooner they can apply their skills, the better. The odds increase that someone will stay if they feel engaged with a project and doing what they came to do. When onboarding new attendees I was able to steer people in the right direction.

We looked at implementing Communities of Practice, and I incorporated this in our remote onboarding prototype.

Design for the Community, by the Community.

Be welcoming and show who we are through our Design Principles.

Instill structure that secures continuity of the organization.

This meant clarifying how our projects/meetings/files were organized. We took a look at how governance was structured. We looked at other non-profits in order to better understand how we might thrive. This included such wide-ranging organizations as a grocery cooperative in Brooklyn, NY to other Brigades in the Code for America network.

We built out a strong feedback loop that would codify our relationship to our community partners.