The Trouble with Volunteers

As I’ve men­tioned ear­lier, I’ve recently received a piece of spam from the Dean Cam­paign. A num­ber of peo­ple have writ­ten me ask­ing if I con­tacted the Dean cam­paign. Yes, I have and I hope to get an answer. Based on fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion, though, it looks like this could be a case of an over-eager vol­un­teer. The rea­son I am going with that assump­tion for now is that, while research­ing the sub­ject, I’ve learned of another case hap­pen­ing ear­lier this year. Based on the offi­cial apol­ogy on that prior inci­dent, I sus­pect that this may be a sim­i­lar case. A sub­se­quent dis­cus­sion brings up the inter­est­ing point of vol­un­teers online and the dif­fi­culty in man­ag­ing them.

This might be an inter­est­ing point to inves­ti­gate fur­ther as more of the cam­paigns are going to try to engage peo­ple directly via the online medium dur­ing this pres­i­den­tial cam­paign. A good start­ing point on this is to get your vol­un­teers more famil­iar with Neti­quette. While a bit dated, Neti­quette by Vir­ginia Shea pro­vides you with a good ground­ing in the basics of online communication.

Here are some basic things to watch out for:

• When send­ing a mes­sage, first check that the per­son you are send­ing it to wants to receive it. If they do, you will have proof (either in the way of an online reg­is­tra­tion (I’ll get to this point later), a paper reg­is­tra­tion (where the indi­vid­ual has given you per­mis­sion to use the email for more info), or an email from the indi­vid­ual ask­ing to be added to your dis­tri­b­u­tion list
• If you are using online reg­is­tra­tion, make sure you get a double-entry sys­tem, which sends a con­fir­ma­tion to the user via email and requires him/her to visit a URL in order to con­firm their reg­is­tra­tion. The use of such sys­tem ensures that the user’s email address is really the address of some­one who wants to receive infor­ma­tion from you
• If an inci­dent (like the one I described ear­lier) hap­pens, make sure you are respon­sive. A good way to do so is to actu­ally have a stated pol­icy on your site regard­ing the use of SPAM. It may seem like overkill but will save you many headaches if peo­ple are aware that you do not con­done such behavior.A good thing to have, is a spe­cial email address to receive infor­ma­tion related to spam. The rea­son for this is that the address can go to the mail­box of some­one who will inves­ti­gate such spam case and dis­cour­age any such attempts (the need for such inves­ti­ga­tion will prob­a­bly be war­ranted in the future as spam could become an easy way to smear your competitors)
• Be upfront about it: If I see a place that has infor­ma­tion on a par­tic­u­lar piece of spam listed directly on their site, along with some infor­ma­tion as to what they believe hap­pened, I will still be tempted to trust the source. If I don’t get that kind of feed­back (apol­ogy or expla­na­tion), I may put you in my spam list and avoid any future mes­sage from you.

Spam is a big prob­lem. If you don’t con­trol your vol­un­teers, it could become a big prob­lem for your cam­paign.