Build on Your Givers: How Volunteer Leaders Can Leverage Matchers and Takers to Build a Sustainable Volunteering Culture
When I picked up a book about givers and takers in the working world, I assumed that it would hold little relevance for my side gig as a leader in a volunteer organization, Hack for L.A. (a Brigade of Code for America). After all, isn’t a volunteer organization self-selecting for givers? Not so fast. In Give & Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success, the complex behaviors that Wharton professor Adam Grant documents are highly relevant to volunteer organizations. And his insights into the hidden drives that animate giving suggest mechanisms that we can use to help us grow and engage the volunteer organizations of which we’re members.
The Givers, Takers and Matchers framework
On its surface Grant’s framework is what your intuition suspects. The key difference is that Grant uses these terms to attribute not just behavior but motive. A Giver is someone who gives out of a true focus on others; thus not everyone who gives is a Giver.
- Givers are people who are fundamentally motivated to give their resources (energy, time, money) to those who ask. At the extreme, they risk burnout and becoming doormats.
- Takers consume resources from others with little regard for the net drain they represent. They tend to see the world through a competitive lens: win-lose, zero-sum and dog-eat-dog. (I found a certain morbid fascination in Grant’s study of how Takers operate, many of whom don’t seem to know they’re Takers.)
- Matchers outnumber both extremes, but we don’t think about them as much. Matchers are driven by fairness and reciprocation. They keep accurate accounts of favors they owe, and when a Taker burns a bridge it’s the Matchers who lit it.
If you work with volunteers, you may be surprised by the complexity in the act of giving itself. As I’ll discuss in greater detail below, the most successful Givers are motivated to some extent by their own needs. And the most energetic giving communities are constructed to encourage Matchers and even Takers to pay it forward.
The complex inner life of giving
All Matchers and even most Takers act like Givers in some aspect of their lives. Givers occur so infrequently in the population that there simply aren’t enough of them to staff our volunteer organizations. We must therefore find a way to motivate Matchers (and even Takers) to contribute their energy to our causes.
A lot of the energy in volunteer organizations comes from Matchers, who are generally motivated by something like reciprocation: returning a networking favor, doing their fair share at church, or taking a turn in the carpool. And even Takers give. It’s a matter of survival, since once a group of Matchers realizes someone is a Taker they will punish her. The Taker might therefore be motivated to be the first to give, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, in an act that Grant calls “strategic giving.”
With the background out of the way, let’s get to the fun of applying some insights.
Harnessing sustainable Giver energy in a volunteer organization
Volunteer-based organizations run on the collective energy of their members. Volunteer energy is an important resource, but we shouldn’t think of it as something that can only be expended. It’s renewable if deployed effectively, and the strongest volunteer organizations generate more volunteer energy as they go, creating a virtuous cycle that enables sustainable growth.
The enemy of this energy is disengagement. If you work with a volunteer group you already know that departure there tends to look different from that of regular workplaces. In volunteer organizations, especially loose-knit ones like Code for America Brigades, people don’t as often quit as simply let other priorities draw them away. I would therefore refer to the following as reasons for disengagement rather than quitting, and note that they often overlap.
Below I’ll identify five patterns of disengagement and consider how to reduce them.
Disengagement Cause #1: Not feeling the impact
The Challenge: Since training is often required to effectively interact with the actual people that volunteers want to help — from medical conditions like heart disease to social ills like homelessness — volunteers don’t often get a chance to witness the impact of their contribution firsthand.
Seeing impact directly is a big motivator for volunteers and employees alike. Grant provides strong evidence of the effectiveness of such engagement in his study of undergraduates who cold-call alumni to solicit donations. In that setting it was scholarship students who benefited from the solicitations, and hearing from one directly made individual call center students more productive by hundreds of percent. In that case the callers were meeting fellow students, so there was a low barrier to such meetings. How can we bridge the bigger gaps between volunteers and beneficiaries that characterize many volunteer organizations, including civic tech?
Suggested Solution #1: Wherever possible, bring the beneficiaries of volunteer efforts into direct engagement with project teams. The key is defining “beneficiaries” more broadly than a new volunteer might expect, including trained workers who will use the output of volunteer efforts to directly help others.
In software and website development, the user-centered design methodology already puts a few members of the team (e.g., the user experience designer and product manager) in direct contact with end users. The key addition is to expose the entire team to those end users. For example, Hack for L.A. has done several projects in the area of services for the homeless, a very visible societal issue that I believe drives a lot of volunteers to Hack for L.A. Our teams may work alongside individuals experiencing homelessness in some contexts — people struggling with shelter sometimes attend our meetups, and a few homeless activists attended Hack for L.A.’s National Day of Civic Hacking in 2018.
But most of our software efforts in this area have been designed to help service providers do their existing jobs more effectively or efficiently. As a team leader, it’s a simple but effective sort of judo to transfer volunteers’ interest in helping people the professionals who already do that work — all it takes is including the professionals in team meetings periodically. It can seem like a distraction on the given night, but the increased team engagement more than compensates.
This approach isn’t appropriate for all projects, and sometimes stakeholders and end users can’t make it to evening meetups. But you would be surprised how many of them will put in that extra effort if you can explain how impactful it can be.
Suggested Solution #2: Identify a secondary outcome that complements the organization’s main mission and build direct relationships between volunteers and beneficiaries.
In organizations where volunteers are highly skilled, mentorship can be a powerful secondary motivator for volunteers. In the case of Code for America Brigades, building software lends itself to mentoring. Working on a real-world software project is a key step in any budding programmer’s journey to landing a job. And most people who join our organization already believe that bringing people into software from more diverse backgrounds is important — a message they’ve heard from developers, educators, tech leaders and policymakers.
At Hack for L.A. we have begun to nurture the mentoring that naturally occurs on project teams. And we have found that experienced designers, developers, product managers and data scientists enjoy using their time at our meetups to coach. We have created Slack channels dedicated to topics that appeal to leaners, e.g., #ask-a-mentor, #data-enthusiasts, and discipline-based “squads.” We are always on the lookout for ways to encourage mentoring within teams without impacting progress. (Got an idea? Please share!)
Disengagement Cause #2: The time factor — keeping volunteers motivated in the absence of clear timelines
The challenge: Professor Grant identifies burnout as one of the most likely reasons for Givers to stop giving. The degree of a Giver’s personal drive will affect how long they can last in a demanding volunteer environment. But a strong volunteer organization shouldn’t rely on stamina at all! In addition to helping volunteers feel their impact regularly (see above), how can we use timeframes to replenish volunteer energy?
Suggested Solution: Help goal-oriented members find motivation by contextualizing their work within clear timeframes.
In a volunteer organization focused on continuous operations (rather than an event), it’s harder for volunteers to set achievable goals and manage their motivation. At Code for America brigades this challenge is magnified by the fact that each project team has its own rhythm of goals and milestones, so that the organization as a whole is one step removed from the setting of expectations.
In some non-event-driven organizations, external cycles may still be available to help. For example, youth mentorship programs can structure around the school calendar, with volunteers matriculating in the fall along with their mentees. Code for America structures its organizing of volunteer brigades (including Hack for L.A.) on an annual cycle that complements the annual Code for America Summit conference and the recently added annual Brigade Congress. Note that the Congress is about six months apart from the Summit, in effect doubling the frequency of Brigade milestones.
At project-based volunteer groups it falls to project leaders to structure milestones into their teams’ work. These milestones offer members the anticipation of accomplishment and an opportunity to celebrate. The ideal time frame from my experience is somewhere between six and sixteen weeks. At the shorter end of the range, one Hack for L.A. project team started its work with a Google-style “design sprint,” the output of which would be wireframes and data requirements for a minimum viable product (MVP). These sprints are typically structured to take a single week — five days — but on volunteer time these five days were spread across five meetups, and the synthesis of the results took another few weeks, yielding a delivery in eight weeks.
At the other end of the range, sixteen weeks — four months—is the longest you want to give volunteers to reach a major software milestone, even the first working version. Given the tendency of software projects to be harder than anticipated, setting a milestone more than four months into the future risks complete de-motivation if the team falls behind. I also think that this is a good litmus test for the project leaders — if a milestone can’t be comfortably delivered in sixteen weeks, you should seriously consider reducing the scope for that milestone.
The importance of this time factor varies a lot between individual volunteers and different organizations. I have planned a future post about how Lean Product Development methodology can be combined with with Agile software practices to take the pressure off delivery timelines, instead focusing the team on running shorter experiments to find fit with their end user’s needs. This has the benefit of aligning the team around shorter-term goals, teaching them modern processes, and reducing the chance that the software they are building will fail to help its intended beneficiaries.
Disengagement Cause #3: Poorly defined norms of effort and giving in the organization
The Challenge: New members don’t know what is expected of them in many different areas, from how teams work to how much energy is expected of them. This can lead to poor pacing — start too fast and burn out; start too slow and never feel engaged at all.
Suggested Solution: Grant identifies community norms as a powerful lever for ensuring that the vast majority of individuals in a community contribute enough to sustain involvement, even folks with Taker tendencies. His most powerful illustration of the value of norms comes from research that has been done on Freecycle, a web-based community where people can give items away rather than throw them away. People often join Freecycle for relatively selfish reasons: getting something for free or avoiding disposal costs. But then something interesting happens. Once they are added to a Freecycle community, norms of giving take over. Matchers, the majority type who are driven by reciprocating favors, are driven to give something away just to balance things out. Even Takers realize that their reputation in the Freecycle community will be tarnished if they only take free stuff and never give. The result is a self-fulfilling cycle of paying it forward.
The lesson we can apply to our own volunteer organizations is the value of norm setting. The Freecycle ecosystem is simpler in many ways, particularly in supporting one-off transactions rather than ongoing collaboration. But in some ways norms are even more powerful in our organizations. Most Hack for L.A. volunteers meet each other in person, creating a strong sense of community, and people coordinate their efforts throughout the week over digital tools like Slack and Github.
So, what norms do we need to set? The highest-functioning project teams at Hack for L.A. tend to have norms like the following:
- A focus on accomplishment, not just time served. Teams have a sense of the current phase of their project, the next milestone, and whether anything is blocking progress. The more entrepreneurial or driven members of the group set a level of focus to which others are inspired to rise.
- Honoring each other’s commitment. Volunteers in many volunteer organizations are treated like “outdoor cats,” free to come and go as they please, and this is certainly true at Hack for L.A. However, when someone does put in greater effort, such as project work at home (not at the meetup), others make themselves available to enable that person’s work. This can mean answering a question on the team’s Slack channel, doing a code review, or checking into a deployment issue. Imagine how that energetic contributor would feel if their work was impeded by lack of support… and then ensure it’s not happening in your organization.
- Process rigor on par with a real job. There is a tendency in an evening meetup for people to want to unwind. It’s a benign sort of drag on effectiveness similar to procrastination. The antidote is a culture of professionalism. Has the product manager prepared enough user stories to keep developers busy? Has the tech lead set up the deployment pipeline so that pull requests (new code) can be merged and tested? Has the team seen the agenda for tonight’s meeting with the main stakeholder from the city department?
These norms can contribute to team coherence and performance, and their lack can have a powerful negative impact. Encourage your members to think about what norms matter to them, and to make sure that their teams share these values.
Disengagement Cause #4: Not feeling that their giving is valued
The Challenge: Those who give might lose interest if their giving isn’t acknowledged — especially those who, like most of us, are not at the extreme Giver end of the spectrum. In Grant’s analysis of Freecycle, the key to engaging Matchers and Takers in the pay-it-forward flywheel is making giving visible. We know this intuitively from our own experiences of acknowledgement, yet as organizations struggling to coordinate complex operations we too often fail to ensure that people feel recognized for their contributions.
Suggested Solution: Establish a cadence of member recognition activities that can be entered in your organizational calendar. The opportunity here is to take what we’ve learned above about what motivates Givers, Matchers and Takers and ensure that people are recognized for the types of giving that matter to them. Recognize that Givers are the ones who start the chain reaction of giving, setting the standard that Matchers and Takers will try to meet. At the top organizational level, leaders can ensure that the community hears gratitude from them at regular intervals or after significant accomplishments. Project leaders can be coached to perform a more improvisational style of recognition.
However, it’s important to sound a note of caution here. If you’ve done much reading about the psychology of motivation, you might have noticed that many of the mechanisms that I’ve adapted from Grant act on people’s intrinsic motivation. Research has established very clearly that human beings (and our primate cousins) perform best when their motivation is intrinsic, coming from the personal experience of the activity rather than anything external like compensation or praise. Introducing extrinsic motivators, like paying kids for good grades, can actually have the exact opposite effect.
So how can we make giving visible without fouling the water of intrinsic motivation? I have a few suggestions:
- Team leads can elevate private behaviors into a public forum when it’s a positive, giving behavior. For example, if a developer has been direct-messaging their project’s tech lead all week about trying to solve an issue, the tech lead could write on the team’s Slack channel (a public forum) about what the developer figured out. Language can be used subtly to convey not just the outcome but the personal time the developer spent solving it. “Ayana has been chasing this bug down for us all week, and I’m happy to share…”
- When broadcasting team accomplishments, emphasize the intrinsic motivations that led to the success. You’re celebrating the team norms, values and practices that led to success, not just the outcome.
- Look for ways to make each regular contributor feel like they have responsibility for something specific. This serves two important purposes that are key to the sustainability of any organization, volunteer or not. It builds ownership and develops new leaders, outcomes which are more commonly associated with paid employment but no less important for volunteers. But it also serves to recognize people for doing what they’re doing at their current level. At Hack for L.A., our non-technical contributors sometimes feel like impostors. We have been careful to include SMEs (subject matter experts) as a role in our target team structure. Project leaders can also develop non-technical contributors by giving clear names to non-technical roles that need doing; “data validation” is more descriptive than “making sure the market hours are right,” and “usability testing” gives a purpose to the potentially aimless experience of on-boarding oneself to a new project.
(These subtle tricks of team interaction are the special sauce of leadership. If you have your own favorite spice please share in the comments.)
Disengagement Cause #5: Burnout, a special risk for Givers in leadership roles
The Challenge: Givers who think only of others tend to rise in volunteer organizations, taking on more responsibility. Yet while their rise to leadership makes Givers more visible, thereby fueling a culture of giving, it also increases their risk of burnout by making it harder for them to protect their energy and balance their commitments.
Suggested Solution: Help your Givers adopt the self-protective behaviors that enable Givers to sustain their contributions to your organization over the long run.
One of the most interesting revelations in Give and Take is that, in the working world, Givers are both the most successful and most-promoted employees and the least. Takers and Matchers are in the middle of the pack for multiple job metrics, from sales revenues in an eyewear shop to making partner in a consulting firm. Givers succeed more than the other groups, and Givers fail disproportionately. The key difference between the two Giver outcomes is that the successful Givers have a Matcher’s eye for their own self-interest.
Grant spends entire chapters exploring the behavioral nuances revealed by this research area, and they’re worth your time (especially if you’re a Giver!). But for my purpose here it’s enough to note Grant’s term for this dual focus of successful Givers: otherish. (Other + selfish.) The difference between success and failure as a Giver lies in the risk of operating in a world that also has Takers, or just taking, in it. The otherish approach to giving assumes the best in others yet keeps a wary eye.
Self-protection from Takers may not seem important in our volunteer organizations, which tend not to have many Takers in them. But there is nonetheless a force that has the effect of “taking” everything Givers can give. In fact, it’s sitting right under your nose in your mission statement: the Need in the world that your organization was built to address. This Need can seem bottomless, a mouth that is always hungry no matter how much volunteer energy we feed it. Those who see only the Need, blind to their own wellbeing, face two risks. The first, most obvious risk is burnout. But equally important to organizations is that your leaders take every hands-on task that needs doing, and neglect their leadership activities.
The lesson for leaders is that while we build an organization around giving what we can, we must always keep the otherish tension in mind and in our communication. We can coach our leaders on a balanced approach. And we may need to ask uncomfortable questions when we see Givers making unsustainable sacrifices, even if they don’t realize it themselves.
How do you get Givers to think a little selfishly? Trying to change their behavior is a lot like a negotiation, and luckily that is a topic that best-selling business authors tend to address. Grant offers a behavioral trick that Givers can use to leverage a self-interested argument without giving up their values: focus on the stakes for others. For example, Givers with families get much better compensation when they negotiate salary on behalf of the dependents they support.
In the scenario of leader burnout you can use this research to coach the leader who is at risk. You are actually not a party to the negotiation itself. On one side of the table is your leader. On the other side is the Need that your Giver is so motivated to solve in the world. As discussed above, this need is voracious and therefore a merciless negotiator. The Giver needs your help.
The first step to coaching your Giver’s negotiation is to get them to share your vision of a future where their leadership has enabled a successful project. With a shared vision you can get their cooperation in identifying what needs to change to enable their execution of leadership duties.
- Delegation — Self-less Givers have a tendency to get pulled into hands-on tasks in addition to their leadership duties, most frequently because their volunteer team is understaffed or experiencing churn. This can lead to an overwhelming workload that impairs their capacity to lead in the short term and harms their growth as a leader in the long run. If delegates are available on the team, coaching the leader in team development (and the role of patience in coaching) can enable their delegation.
- Deceleration — In other cases, especially with a less experienced leader who is used to being hands-on, deceleration is worth considering. Can she make being both a team leader and a hands-on contributor more sustainable by shifting a deadline or reducing the scope of the current phase of work?
While at first glance the splitting of humanity up into “two types of people” seems like an exercise in stereotyping, I hope I have conveyed the richness of understanding that can come from viewing yourself and the people around you through this lens. I have tried to keep this article generally useful for many types of volunteer organizations, using the software team examples from my own experience for illustration.
In the future I intend to write further about how behavioral frameworks can complement the software-specific practices (e.g., lean product development) of civic tech organizations like Hack for L.A., our sibling Code for America Brigades across the U.S., and even similar organizations around the world.
Keep an eye on the Hack for L.A. publication on Medium.
