Contribute/Funnels/Process

Different processes work for different communities, but here we will provide some guidance and best practices for managing your contributor funnels. Moving forward, we are looking into providing tools for you to use and ways to extract meaningful metrics from the inquiries coming in leading to more effective onboarding.

Mozilla Hispano's Process

Based on the blog post by Nukeador.

Here is an example process from first contact to assigning the contributor a mentor:

• Someone fills out the form on your localised Contribute page (from mozilla.org/contribute or an embedded form)
• The email comes into your alias or the address of the individual triaging the emails.
• The person who filled out the form gets an auto-response, with different links depending on the area of interest. Here it is important to note that this email tells people to read a few links with information about how to get involved (area description, link to contribute forum...) and to answer when they are ready to start (reply-to header is defined to your customised email address). The auto-response email templates do not need to be translated literally, you can cusomise them to your needs.
• It is difficult to handle more than 100 inquiries per week if you have to manually answer every one, so you can wait until the person reads the initial information and answers the auto-response email to assign them a mentor.
• In the auto-response, stress that they can contribute to Mozilla even if they do not have much time. It has been observed that many people don't answer this first auto-response because they are not sure if they were going to be able to handle it.
• If the person answers, a mentor is assigned and you go through procedure for onboarding new contributors.

At every step along the way in this process, there is room for maneuver and further refinement. If you have any best practices in how you do it, please do share here.

Mozilla l10n process

Our challenge here has been complicated. Our process has to fit these requirements:

1. It has to support growth within an l10n team while respecting their workflow.
2. It has to give the newcomer an assignment with rapid payoff.
3. It has to plug the newcomer into the existing l10n team.
4. It has to lead the newcomer to resources to learn how to contribute beyond the initial assignment.
5. It has to lead the newcomer to resources to help them start their own l10n of Firefox if one doesn't already exist.

Here is our workflow:

• Inquiree receives auto-response directing the newcomer to http://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n:Contribute.
• L10n:Contribute contains five steps for them to get involved. These steps were designed with two goals in mind: 1) give them something simple to do to contribute that doesn't interrupt the workflow of the l10n teams, & 2) get them plugged into the l10n teams from the very beginning while respecting their own onboarding funnels.
• Newcomer visits their l10n team's wiki page, (here's a good example page: https://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n:Teams:pt-BR). There is a header that says "How to join this l10n team" where each l10n team should list five steps to joining and contributing to their effort.
• Newcomer contacts the team and begins contributing to the l10n team's effort with minimal disruption and within the team's established workflow.

A very important part of this workflow is ensuring that all l10n teams identify these five steps to joining and contributing to their team. Without those, the newcomer flownders and ultimately does not turn into an active contributor.

Tips from Mozilla Recruiting

Michelle Marovich from Mozilla Recruiting has pulled together some tips from her experience in the Onboarding New Volunteers Workshop