I’m preparing to teach a class on online community management for nonprofits, through a college back East in the USA (details in the coming weeks), and I realized recently I had done a presentation that I can use in class. The presentation is from 2014 for a group called OCTribe, a monthly in-person meeting in San Francisco. It was a meetup for online community managers, enthusiasts and innovators interested in social networking applications, social media and online group collaboration. “We discuss tools and strategies to enhance participation in the various online communities we support.” The event was hosted at the TechSoup offices.

My presentation, which was also live-streamed on YouTube, is exactly as it is titled: online community management as volunteer management. I look at participants in an online community, especially when I’m the moderator or facilitator of that community, as volunteers – they aren’t paid to participate, they aren’t paid to contribute, and yet, they do. I think cultivating new community members is a lot like cultivating new volunteers, I think supporting and keeping community members is a lot like supporting and keeping new volunteers, and on and on.

I have the presentation available both as a podcast (about 40 minutes) that you can live stream from my web site or download, however you like, and in a video that I have edited. The video isn’t very good, but don’t worry about seeing the slides – I say out loud during the presentation most everything that is on them. I also repeat the questions and comments people ask.

The video is now a part of my playlist of trainings – I have more than two hours of free training by video on my own YouTube channel, plus links to trainings I’ve provided on other YouTube channels. I would so appreciate it if you could “like” my latest video on YouTube, as well as to subscribe to my channel.

There’s no question that contributing to online communities can help you professionally – I know because it’s how I’ve landed full-time jobs and consultancies for more than 25 years.

Also, the Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook: Fully Integrating Online Service Into Volunteer Involvement can help you better work with people online – specifically volunteers, and including participants in an online community that relates to the work of a nonprofit, NGO, library, environmental issue, humanitarian concern, and on and on. This book was helpful long before the global pandemic spurred so many organizations to, at last, embrace virtual volunteering. This is the most comprehensive resource anywhere on working with online volunteers, and on using the Internet to support ALL volunteers, including those you might not think of as online volunteers. It’s available both as a traditional paperback book and in electronic format.

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