If Adam Grant were to be a Community Manager

What Professor Grant can teach us about building volunteer-driven communities

A lot of us would know Adam Grant. He's a renowned psychologist and professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. However he got really popular for publishing two bestselling books over the last decade - Give and Take in 2013 and Originals in 2016. In Give and Take, Grant talks about 3 types of people in an organisation:

Takers: Those who like to take more than give. They put their personal interests first, and try to benefit from any opportunity that comes their way.

Givers: Those who like to give more than take. They don’t care too much about their reward. They have a tendency to do things for others without expecting anything in return. Or in other words they find pleasure in helping others.

Matchers: Masters of quid pro quo - they try to match the gives and takes. They have an inherent sense of fairness, but also an eye on what’s in it for them. Most people fall into this category.

Based on reciprocity, the three type of people you will find around: Takers, Matchers and Givers. (image source: lemonade.com)

Grant later goes on to explain how the highest performers in every organisation are Givers and how every organisation needs to have policies that protect Givers from being exploited by the Takers. He concludes that an organisation with a combination of Givers and Matchers and no Takers would be primed for excellence. Our motivation with this opinion post is to reflect on how the Taker / Giver / Matcher concept plays out in a volunteer-based community environment and later cover what these communities can do to improve engagement from volunteers. And the first question that would come to most of our minds is:

Aren't all volunteers Givers?

Well, no. Every community you will see around have Givers, Matchers and Takers. It's just that we tend to get confused with the action of taking in volunteering context compared to a for-profit organisational context. Let's try to understand why it's so.

Here's an example of taking in the business context: You seek help from your teammate so that you are able to expedite your efforts in the current sprint (work) in order to meet the deadline and present your work in good light. The value you get out of this transaction can result in a significantly better year-end appraisal that you look forward to. Or maybe a promotion. Now let's consider an example of taking (or getting) in the volunteering context: you were part of the volunteering team that helped set up evening computer classes for kids in an industrial area near your home. As a result, you are featured in a National Weekly for the efforts which can improve your chances of getting into your preferred college since you now have a stellar resume. You also take home the experience of collaborating with public authorities to coordinate these evening computer classes - a great lesson to have learnt while maybe adding a few important names to your growing Rolodex.

These examples are certainly designed for our convenience to convey the point. But it's important to understand how taking happens in the volunteering context. This is not very obvious and the rationale for this behavior is best explained with the help of findings by another stellar psychology professor Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational (2008).

In this book he talks about transactions happening under the purview of 2 norms: market norm and social norm. When you do an activity with an expectation of receiving some form of market currency (cash), you are complying by the market norm. For example - when you agree to babysit for a parent in your neighbourhood for $15 / hour, you are following the market norm. On the other hand, when you do an activity in the form of a social transaction, you are going by the social norm. For example - when you agree to help your friend move to a new house, you are following a social norm. You don't charge him dollars for the "help". Here's a short video of Professor Ariely himself explaining the two norms with a good example:

In a community that's volunteer-driven, most transactions are based on social norms. You give your time, contribute to the cause of the organisation and you get favours / benefits that could indirectly help you but not in the form of market currencies. And since they are not in the form of market currencies, we find it hard to identify the taking part of the transaction.

So as a volunteer in an organisation, we all engage in the process of taking, just that we predominantly follow the social norm and not the market norm.

The second part of this argument goes back to Grant again. In his book, Grant tries to give us an understanding of how givers, matchers and takers are distributed in a population. We learn that you will find fewer givers and takers compared to matchers in any organisation. This means that volunteer-based communities are going to find it hard to ensure all of their volunteers are givers. They will mostly likely end up with a few givers, takers and a lot of matchers.

So if you were under the impression that all volunteers form the cream of givers, according to Grant, now is a time to burst that bubble :). But like any organisation there are ways to get the best participation from all types of people in volunteer-based communities too. Let's try to understand what they are.

How to encourage Giving in your Community?

Since communities heavily rely on their volunteers' giving behaviours to make progress as organisations, it's helpful to look at how you can encourage giving behavior in a community. Here are some of the methods that could help you:

1. Share the organisation's Why, What and How: It helps when a volunteer understands why they are signing up to work for a community and how / what they can do to create value. A great example in this regard is Mozilla Foundation whose mission, that is to ensure the Internet remains a global public resource, open and accessible to all, compels volunteers to think about how they can help with the organisation's active programs and do their part to help with their audacious mission.
2. Acknowledge and celebrate the impact created by volunteers: Remember that your volunteers are trading their time and skills using social norms and hence it's important that they are proactively informed about why their work is important and how it's helping the organisation. At the top organisational level, leaders can ensure that the community hears gratitude from them at regular intervals or after significant accomplishments. This leads to volunteers feeling that their contributions are being valued and it motivates them to invest more time and effort in the organisation. Hack for L.A. (a brigade of Code for America), a volunteer-driven organisation, have written an article where they list out more than one ways of helping volunteers understand the impact they are creating.
3. Screen your volunteer candidates for prior experience as a giver: Your volunteers make the community and it's important that, apart from looking for specific skills required as a volunteer, you understand why they are signing up to volunteer in your organisation and what their motivations are. It helps to look for stories in the candidate's journey where they've shown giving behavior in a community context.
4. Build an goal-oriented roadmap for the organisation: At times, it's not the volunteer's resistance to give but the organisation's inability to take that leads to poor giving behavior. As an organisation it helps to have well-defined programs / tracks in which volunteers can sign up and contribute towards a time-bound goal. While there are many frameworks that can help here, OKR (Objective and Key Results) is followed by many foundations around the world (including Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) to work in a goal / outcome-oriented manner.

So to summarise, you will almost never be able to build a community of givers. But embracing that reality and working to install guardrails to encourage giving in your volunteer-driven organisation can go a long way. Hope you liked reading this post. Feel free to share your ideas on how volunteer organisations can encourage giving.

I co-authored this piece with my friend Matthew John. Do subscribe here for more learnings on Building a Community.

The original post can be seen here