Volunteers
Fri, 10/28/2011 - 15:44
We all could use a helping hand once in a while. Public Computer Centers can benefit from the use of volunteers.
How are you using volunteers in your Public Computer Center? What types of jobs do they perform? Do you provide training for them? How have you recruited volunteers? Have you run across any issues using volunteers? What did you learn or change?
Please share your experiences and good ideas below, so that other Public Computer Centers can benefit from your knowledge.
I am at DPlLs Central Library in the Community Technology Center(CTC).
We use a lot of volunteers(we call them docents) for pretty much everything-we couldn't function without them! We have docents that help us staff our very busy service desk, we have docents that do 1:1 tech help appointments and we try to have a docent assistant in all of our public computer classes. We also have a few docents who teach classes for us. At any given time we haev between 50-100 CTC docents.
We recruit docents by posting on our website, and attending volunteer fairs at local colleges and the like.
Based on docent feedback, and our own observations,we have recently revamped how we train docents. All docents attend a 1 hour introductory orientation. At that point, we figuee out which role they would be best suited for(service desk, 1:1, classroom). Then we set up the 2nd piece of training, which is a series of shadowing sessions. First, we have them shadow someone doing whatever it is they want to do 2-3 times. Then we shadow them and finally a staff person shadows them and "sign off" on them,,. which means they are ready to be on their own. We have also created a scavenger hunt for the CTC wiki we have created for our docents and new docents complete that, which both familiarizes them with the wiki and ensures they are exposed to some of the more important issues/standards they need to do a good job.
The biggest issue with volunteers for us is consistency. Trying to make sure that people who many only be here once or twice a month are aware of and follow our standards of service. We also get more last minute shift cancellations and the like than we do with staff, but over all our docents are actually really reliable-we are super lucky to have such a great gropup of people willing to help us out.
One thing I recommend is showing your docents how much you appreciate them however you can. We all make a concerted effort to thank each of our volunteers after every single shift. We also throw docent happy hours which are pretty well attended and a lot of fun and this year we were lucky enough to have a little money to buy gifts-we gave each of our docents a really nice metal flash drive, engraved with our logo and preloaded with some useful(free) software.
Hope this is helpful!