Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer’s personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today’s post is with Amy2, who volunteers as a Development & Membership staffer and graphic designer.
How does what you do as a Development & Membership volunteer fit into what the OTW does?
Owning the servers and lack of advertising are both key parts of the OTW’s mission, but to do that, we rely on user donations. The Development & Membership committee (DevMem) is responsible for the fundraising efforts, which are largely focused around the April and October drives. My job is to make the graphics—drive headers, member icons, designs for donation gifts, etc. — as well as some membership data work. (The latter is mostly moving spreadsheet columns around, and updating donors’ addresses and donation gift requests.)
What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?
At the beginning of the week, I go through the DevMem inbox to make sure that we’ve answered all the donor questions. We have a meeting midweek, and if it’s time to send out a batch of donation gifts, I get in touch with everyone who needs to confirm their address with us. (Or: I’m sending follow-up emails to the people I haven’t heard back from.) My tag wrangling bins are fairly slow — shoutout to those of you dabbling in Sumerian and Babylonian mythology! — so I usually only check on those once a week or so as well.
If we’re a couple of months out from a drive or election (i.e. about 50% of the time,) I’ll have graphics to work on. Once those are ready, it’s pretty quiet for me until the drive starts up, at which point we try to have as many hands on deck as possible to answer emails.
I’m currently in training for the Volunteer & Recruitment Committee, so I don’t know what a typical week there is yet! But right now, for me, it’s tutorials.
You started out as a graphic designer and later added the role of membership data specialist, as well as joining Tag Wrangling and Volunteers & Recruiting. What made you decide to expand your volunteering into other parts of the organization besides graphics?
When I joined DevMem, we only had one person doing pretty much all membership data work — they’re a hero and should be honored as such — and when it got to the point that that really wasn’t working anymore, a couple of us were trained on the database so we could help take the load off. I volunteered for that because I had the fewest responsibilities outside of drive season, so it seemed like a good way to be helpful.
Around that point I started getting more involved in the social side of the OTW, where I learned more about what other people were doing, and what work looked interesting to me.* One of the best parts of being an OTW volunteer is the other volunteers, who can always be counted on to enable encourage you to push yourself and try new things.
*This also put me in the path of evangelizing tag wranglers.
What’s your favorite task or project that you have worked on for the OTW?
This is a hard one! I’d probably have to say the Hugo Award merchandise. The weeks after we won were obviously an exciting time for the AO3 community, and it was very special to help mark that occasion. It was also the first time I had the chance to design a donation gift, so it was gratifying to see how popular they were — though they may have had to excavate our premiums specialist out from under the piles of stickers.
I also really enjoyed making the April 2020 drive banner and member icon: they include favorite tags from nearly all of our translation teams, which was a neat glimpse into what tropes and turns of phrase are popular in the non-English speaking parts of AO3. It was fun to watch people on Twitter find their languages’ tags.
What fannish things do you like to do?
Read fic, write fic, make book covers for fics, ramble about books and media that I love at one in the morning on tumblr dot com… the usual. Lately I’ve been learning InDesign by formatting my favorite fanfics and having them printed in book format: if this lockdown lasts much longer, I may end up with a dedicated fanfiction shelf in my bookcase.
Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in comments. Or if you’d like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.