Unmask yourselves

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I think that you’ve missed a trick here:

  • One of the main problems with CS is that it became faceless and corporate.
  • It also forgot about putting people at the centre, by failing to address safety issues and neglecting community leaders.
    You obviously know this as you touch upon it under “Mission and values”.

Your site though gives NO impression that you are more personable. So make it so! Put your faces, bios, job descriptions, organigramme out there so that the Web knows that you’re not no-hopers/scammers/sharks-in-suits. The world is in a dark place at the moment and distrust is a default response to newness for many, so you’ve got to overcome that.

At the moment “Our Team” (consistency problem here: “Our Team” at the bottom, “The Team” on the page itself) is squirreled away under “Community” at the bottom of each page. That works for a bank or a small business, but you should have “Our team” as a tab at the very top, after “Forum”. The “Our Team” page also needs more TLC. Don’t just have it as blocks like in PInterest. You have a hierarchy, so show it: “Co-founders” (list the 2); Board; Translators; IT team, Marketing team, etc. Have links of course at the top so the user can whizz between the different teams. Include staffing numbers there if possible to show how many people you are. This is currently very opaque.

Although it’s cool to have the pics of each person, and particularly their location, make these people human. Age, studies, current job (is this their current job?). Aapeli and Itsi in particular come across as very remote - I’ve barely seen them on the forums in 2022. Fish rots from the top down, etc., so give them a better image, to stress that they won’t go and do a Couchsurfing on users. Just stating it in your mission statement is not enough, cf. “Don’t be evil” by Google/Alphabet.

Having “Our team” there will also give you a more prominent space for advertising the vacant positions. Maybe you’re not getting enough or good enough applicants because people aren’t seeing that you need this. So at the top of that “Our Team” page, you could easily stick “Current vacancies” on the left- or right-hand side.

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Hey @Davecogz, thanks for the detailed thoughts on this.

I think you’re completely right that we need to make an effort not to be faceless. Yes there’s a bunch we can do to spruce up the Our Team page to make it more personable (and show positions we need, as you’ve suggested).

If I could add to this as well, it would be great for us to have full bios and interviews with volunteers that could be linked to from the team page. You seem like a good writer so let me know this is something you’d be interested in helping with :slight_smile:

Although I am guilty of forgetting to this month, we plan on also recording all of our Town Hall meetings to post around, so this will give a good chance to put faces to the organization as well.

I think you’re very right that although we know we won’t “do a Couchsurfing”, it’s also important to stress and communicate that to current and potential members. We’re always open to more ideas on this, so thank you for sharing!

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