Webinar on how to motivate, manage and train volunteers
This webinar shares Cochrane's experience on working with volunteers and results from studies conducted in Cochrane's translation community on how to motivate, manage and train volunteers:
Acknowledge translators in the translation notes
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- It is up to individual teams to determine the minimum contribution volunteers should make in order to be eligible for a certificate or reference. In order to keep your effort limited, you may want to set a minimum, for example, 10 translations.
- You may want to review your volunteers’ contributions every 6 or 12 months to check who can or wants to receive a certificate or reference, and issue them all in one go. This might be easier than having to produce them on an ongoing or ad-hoc basis.
- Feel free to use the text from the templates, but make sure you use the correct branding for your country, if applicable.
- Provide a list of citations of all Reviews that the volunteer translated, or at least some recent examples, and links to the published translations.
- Briefly explain your position and your work within Cochrane. If Cochrane is not well known in your country, you could also provide some background information. You can use the ‘About us’ section on www.cochrane.org to help you write this part or link to the page containing information about your project.
- When you write a reference, ask the volunteer if there is anything they would like you to mention specifically. You don’t just have to focus on language skills. For example, are they good at communicating, quick to respond, and efficient? Do they have expertise in a certain area of health?
- If you are willing to, it’s a good idea to provide your email address or a phone number in case the recipient of the reference or certificate would like to request additional information.
Examples from our teams
- Read this blog post about how Cochrane Malaysia is motivating volunteers through certificates, awarded on an annual basis: http://community.cochrane.org/news/translating-health-evidence-cochrane-malaysia-motivates-translators-achievement-certificates
Provide in-kind benefits
You may not be able to pay your volunteers in cash, but maybe you have access to other non-cash “payments” through your institution or other organisations that you could make available from time to time to longer-term contributors, for example, vouchers for books, training or events, access to institutional resources, etc.
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