By Melissa Ruryk
Forget FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out)… if you’re a student, or a new member of the IDL SIG, you might have Fear Of Not Being Qualified. Not being qualified to volunteer, that is.
Hey, don’t worry about it! The SIG leadership wants to see more students and members stepping up and learning about the SIG and making our SIG the best community in STC. We understand you might not want to throw yourself into a body of water that might be way over your head. So here’s the perfect way to dip your toe in the volunteer pool… before diving in:
Short term tasks available now
- What do you want to learn about? How about thinking of 3 new webinar topics and sourcing presenters for us?
- Which podcast or article did you find fascinating last month? Will you track down the podcaster/author and ask if we can reprint the item?
- Setting up an Instagram account for the SIG that’s aligned with our Facebook page.
- Gather attendance records from SIG events (mostly webinars) during the year, for reporting on the Community Achievement Award (CAA) application.
- Are you growing fonder of the spoken word rather than all this reading? Can you make short informational videos on the IDL website about how to join, what the IDL does, job roles? Or any other ideas?
- Capture social media activities (even easier, initiate them) to report on the CAA application.
- Monitor our Slack channel (#instructional-design) and bring interesting discussions to the manager for review and action if needed.
- Help the Membership manager with emailing welcome letters to new members.
- Are you a student? Buddy up with another new student member.
- Edit an article that’s been submitted to our award-winning IDeaL newsletter for publication.
- Submit your own article to IDeaL.
- Help on the team that is planning a virtual members’ event at the upcoming Summit in June 2021.
- Been a member for a while? Tell us what you get out of belonging in a short video or newsletter article.
New information will be added to the SIG website soon, detailing additional short-term, one-off tasks for which you can volunteer. These tasks won’t take more than 2 hours (including any training you’d need), and you can sign up for one task or more, as you like. We are especially looking for people who are comfortable with any of the various social media accounts the SIG uses. Your volunteer “task” might be to tweet about an upcoming webinar, or announce our newsletter has just been published.
See? Not hard, not onerous.