General Issues Store Folken Need to Work On
Getting More Volunteers
Here's a list of stuff preventing us from getting more, regular volunteers:
- There can be at times very little staff time left over after selling, sorting, and putting out fires to coordinate volunteers.
- There are a large number of (individually) simple pieces of information required to be very effective.
- There is very little work where it is visually obvious what to do
- Its easy to make mistakes that require non-trivial amounts of work to fix (often by staff members) [cost of failure is relatively high]
- Store isn't exactly a sexy place to work and dealing with the general public brings an entire suite of demotivators to the plate
- Its often loud
- There are few things currently available for volunteers with physical disabilities to do
- Store volunteers might volunteer only to intercept items they want
- The current store staff is mostly men, potentially a social barrier to getting female volunteers
- Our existing documentation for training volunteers changes every time we get a new person! Do we really need to re-invent the wheel every time?
Proposed solutions
- Get more labor into advanced testing first, make more money on component sales, buy more dedicated store labor
- Divide and conquer the sea of rote information. Have 3 divisions of store volunteers: 1) adopter (simple, visual) 2) post build (more advanced, perhaps in conjuction with Tech Support Volunteerism)
- Interns (project based).
- Part of getting adopters involved. Requires just a ton of visual aids, reorganization of stuff to make putting stuff away easier, and perhaps, partial management by interns
- Continue to improve store atmosphere. Develop a rewards system for good volunteering. Keep people-adverse volunteers away from interacting with public by having work for them to do that does not involve interaction with others.
- Develop a fourth division of labor for volunteers with physical disabilites. Have a space available for them to be productive.
- Actively recruit women into the store for volunteering
- Improve documentation within an agreed-upon framework, perhaps through the division of labor mentioned above (really you would just need adopter-specific tools and post-build specific tools).
Dependencies
- More money and the priority for it to be spent on us
- Much planning, experimentation, and tweaking
- Visual aids, simple flow charts, and simple documentation
- Sound dampening materials and design
Online Sales
There is a need to evaluate how much we are making from online sales and how much we could be making. We also should look at whether we want to organize it better, add more staff hours, etc.