Counterintuitive Advice: If you want to Engage Volunteers, Consider Asking for More Not Less, Making it Harder not Easier to Participate

Particularly in community volunteer settings such as churches and schools, it is common to basically beg for people to get people involved.  The general tone of the request is apologetic and pleading.  "We just need..."  "If you could only sign up for..."  "All we are asking is..."  After a lifetime of studying and living this dynamic, I am finally surrendered to counterintuitive reality:  if you want somebody to do something, ask for more not less.  Make it harder, not easier for them to participate.

As a pastor of a small church, I definitely witnessed this phenomenon close at hand in at least two significant ways:

1) In annual reflection and check-in meetings, the volunteers who were the happiest with the church were ALWAYS those who were most involved.  The ones who were on the margins had the most complaints.  Although I didn't scientifically study it, it seemed that their happiness was caused by the higher participation not that they chose to participate more because they were happy (and vice versa--the people who had been neutral before drifting into low participation seemed to find themselves less and less happy with the community as their participation decreased).

2)  A second example of this revealed itself when we hired a someone to coach us how to set up intimate care circles in the community.  To get into a circle, he recommended that you had to 

• sign up to try one out
• fill out an application
• be interviewed 
• make the following commitments
• to go to every meeting
• for a full year
• to follow all the other guidelines in the meeting
• and if and when you leave, to go through a process for leaving

Even though we had compensated the consultant abundantly (in our terms) for teaching us how to do this, some of us balked at all these barriers to entry.  "We don't want to scare people away;" "that is too hard;" and "we're a caring and loving community" reflect the essence of the concerns.  Because we paid him, we chose to take his advice (and another example perhaps of this principle in action).  When we did, the result was astounding.  We had more sign-ups and applications than we could admit.  It was by far the most successful recruitment effort we had while I was there.

I suspected this would be true because years before I had been a Kindergarten teacher at another church where being a Sunday school teacher was a huge commitment. At many of the centers or churches I work with now, the community norm is you take whatever you can get. You assume that people are too busy to do it weekly. You ask can they maybe do it one Sunday a month. When they do volunteer, you require very little of them in terms of training or prep. All you want is a live, preferably vetted, adult in the room with them. Very few people volunteer. This reinforces an idea that people don't have time. You ratchet down expectations even further.  Rinse. Repeat.  

In contrast, at my old church it was a HUGE commitment to be a Sunday School Teacher. To do it you gave up all opportunity to be in a Sunday service live. You worked with one or two other teachers. The three of you had to meet weekly to plan lessons and monthly with your supervising teacher.  The supervising teachers met periodically with the program leader.  This kind of structure is very common in large successful churches and there's a reason for that. We all three found it to be a wonderful experience.  We loved our meetings and planning. We loved being with the kids.  It's cliché but we all felt we received far more than we gave.  It was an absolutely delightful time. 

This has been SO hard for me to accept despite mountains of evidence that it works.  In college, I studied and even wrote my undergraduate thesis on the psychology of cognitive dissonance.    The theory, studied and proven in various ways, is that when people are asked to make a significant commitment of some kind, whether it is paying a lot of money for something, going through a rigorous application process or simply donating a great deal of their time and energy, they HAVE to rationalize why they are doing what they are doing.  If we don't rationalize (or "reduce dissonance") we may find ourselves believing we have wasted a great deal of money and time which is profoundly uncomfortable.

  

The MORE we are asked to do/pay/go through, the more highly we consider the experience, whatever it is.  Sometimes, even if we do not enjoy the experience itself, we still value it very highly in retrospect.  This has certainly been found with many combat veterans.  They gave a great deal, maybe even witnessed or experienced hell, and they value that time and their comrades in arms immensely.

The biggest obstacles to integrating this wisdom into volunteer-driven communities boils down to, as illustrated above:

• Many such communities are highly egalitarian and have a strong value against any barrier to entry EVEN if it results in more members and a better community.
• This can be particularly true the more tolerant and inclusive a community perceives themselves to be.  Obviously there are grossly unfair barriers in the world that one would never want to use such as gender, race and cultural barriers.  And there are also barriers that may seem neutral which can disproportionately function to exclude along similar lines.  
• It can be emotionally challenging for a community to find its way to real criteria that strengthen a community and can encourage inclusivity even as they make it harder rather than easier to join.  

I'm sure there are a lot of people out there that have thought through this conundrum more than I have.  I would love to hear from you.  Where have you seen loving, fair and functionally inclusive criteria that have bolstered participation and up-leveled communities?