As a community-driven site, we are only as good as the efforts of our community. While our membership drives the value of our content and our vision, it is our volunteers that make it happen. Without volunteers, we can only improve slowly as my time becomes available. However, with volunteers, we can achieve anything.
This page offers anyone considering volunteering their time with some insight into our current needs. This page will be updated over time and cannot be considered the entirety of our needs so feel free to volunteer in additional areas that you see a need.
To become a volunteer, please review our suggested needs below and email me at [email protected] with a suggestion of how you may want to help. You can be selective in your assistance or choose to help with everything below, it is up to you.
Our website is a WordPress site built on Elementor using a Phlox theme. We are looking for people that understand the technology behind building WordPress websites to upgrade its user experience, automate our processes, and provide an administrative backend that is secure and easy to use. The challenge is that without financial backing, we are managing through an assortment of free WordPress plugins and our volunteer’s knowledge. If you have this background, we would love to hear from you. Here are some of the things we are focused on achieving:
- Administration Platform: We wish to create a self-service administration platform that allows users visibility and self-service updates to their contact information. We would love a heads up contextual approach to everyone’s account with ease of use tour signup and tour management. We are seeking a user account plugin that may bring us most of the way there that we can customize to our needs.
- Self-Service Contact Info Updates: We need the ability to update contact info and addresses through the user account or in the automated tour notifications from our automated tour management.
- Automation: We wish to automate our membership processes to make life easier for everyone:
- Application Processing: We wish to have an online form that will manage the data collection process to allow easy manual verification and acceptance through an organized transparent process.
- Joining Tours: We would like to have a “click to join” option for joining tours. This should be a button on the website tour blogs with confirmation comments created. This should also be possible from clicking email notification links that send a confirmation email then they are joined and confirmation comments are added to the tour blog. Perhaps we have a way to see a participation box with participant count? Looking for help here.
- Security: We need to make sure our site is secure, redundant, and backed up – both site and data. Looking for someone that can help us do this through the free WordPress options.
- TBD: This will be a growing list as we work through the first obstacles. We are also looking for visionaries or architects that can help us avoid newbie problems before we make them.
As our website grows in popularity, we will have more need for moderators that can assist in administering and moderating membership issues. If you would like to be part of this community and provide leadership to our members, please reach out and offer your assistance as a moderator.
Our content is open to the public and needs to represent the values of our community. Our content management volunteers will be reviewing new content as it goes live, offering editorial if needed to make sure we provide readable content and assist members in posting their reviews online.
- Content Review: We need volunteers to review our new content within 24 hours of submission to ensure that it meets the standards of our community.
- Community Standards: We need content experts to assess/create a community standard that we can all adhere to.
- Edits: We may need to offer occasional editorial assistance to those that request it or post-submission corrections.
- Submission Assistance: We will need to assist many of our new members in posting their submissions.
- Membership Role Upgrades: We need volunteers to upgrade members to reviewers and upgrade their role through their administrator privileges.
We need to keep in touch with our members by providing help when requested, notifications for new tours, and maybe even work on membership drives to bring in new members.
- Help Desk: We need people to assist with member help requests on a timely basis.
- Notifications/Newsletters: We will be managing our membership through notifications and newsletters that require effort to administer and provide on time. Nobody will join a tour that they do not know about so the membership needs to stay informed.
- Membership Drives: Only so many of our members are truly active with the majority only participating in a single tour per year. This means that we have to be really selective in our tours only selecting the most popular. However, if we have more members, we can offer more obscure and higher quantity of tours that will provide more value and choices to everyone. Therefore, the more members, the better our choices become.
Once we have decided on a tour, someone has to reach out to the manufacturer to secure a tour kit. For popular tours, we may have to secure additional kits as the tour grows to keep the waiting period reasonable. In addition, we want to stay in touch with the manufacturers to stay top of mind for when they launch their next best thing so that they arrange to have inventory to support our tours immediately during the launch.
- Negotiator: We need people that are comfortable reaching out to manufacturers and working through the process of securing tour kits.
- Representative: We need people dedicated to the manufacturer to keep us top of mind for their product launches to make sure we have kits available immediately.
We don’t always have an easy way to drive participation in new tours. Sometimes it requires creativity and networking to find the right people to participate. We should never rely exclusively on the existing membership to fill our participation lists. Instead, we should see new tours as an opportunity to reach and obtain new members. BTW, HEADFI is not the only audio community, we need to reach these other communities as well.
Member Participation: Sometimes our members are not as familiar with a tour brand as we through and require a more hands-on approach to driving participation. We need volunteers to drive discussion between members that fill the required participation for each tour.
Community Outreach: There are non-members in HEADFI or Super Best Audio Friends that would love to join our tours if they were aware they existed. It is important to find existing forum threads, wherever they are, to post an invite to our product tours. We need volunteers that are members of these communities that understand the politics to offer these invites correctly so we do not start a political war.
Creative Networking: Sometimes a direct invite doesn’t make sense, but a direct invite through PM offers more traction. There are many review sites out there that would likely love to join our community to have access to the gear that we are touring. We need volunteers that are creative networkers that can help fill our tours as well as attract more active members and especially reviewers.