1. Consider the experience. This is a bit of wisdom I heard a lot at design school. You always have to think about the user experience. If someone walks into the kitchen at Motown and asks us to refill the cereal container, we have a choice – do we want to make that a positive experience, or a negative one? If we want to make that a positive experience, we can jump up and take care of the cereal container right away. If we want to make that a negative experience, we can brush it off and let them know that we’ll get to it later. Those interactions build and turn into opinions about our program, so it’s vital to be aware of them.
2. Be personable. I’m not a person who is always great at building relationships, but I am generally friendly. This goes a long way when interacting with volunteers, even when I failed to remember their names, or when the project partners didn’t show up at the worksites.
3. Be agile. Some of the most successful things did with social media were things that we thought up right before doing them. For instance, on the day of the church shooting in Charleston, we had the volunteers put their prayers on a prayer board, filmed it and put it to music, then shared it on Facebook. I had the video up on Facebook within an hour of us doing the prayer, and that speed made a huge difference in our impact.
4. Get away. Motown Mission is a stressful place to live and work. The interns who seemed to be having positive experiences were the ones who had frequent escapes, going home or spending time with non-Motown friends on the weekends. The interns who didn’t do that seemed to be very stressed out, which made it harder for them to do their jobs. There were a few weeknights when I drove home, rather than staying at the church, and the next day I came back feeling more rested and calm than usual.
5. No matter how great they are, if you live, work, and hang out with the same small group of people, they will get on your nerves sometimes. That’s totally okay – it just means that you need to see different people, and probably have some alone time.