Bench Strength and the Mumbai Chapter

Many months have passed since I slotted 'Bench Strength' as the word of the month for this blog. For the uninitiated Bench Strength is a term most commonly used in team sport to describe players who do not form part of the starting team in a game, but will be useful during the course of the game. For instance, the 6th, 7th and 8th player in basketball, the 12th man in cricket etc etc. It also refers to budding players who can replace older players in a team.

So what is this term, used so often in team sport and now in corporate sector doing on a SPIC MACAY blog, that too a Mumbai chapter blog ? The author, yours truly, has had the audacity to make it word of the month and provide it a prominent place on this forum. This is not without reason, and has more to do with my intense fascination with the term, which I must admit to!

As I prepared to leave Mumbai earlier this year, I spent time thinking about the future of this chaper. Regular readers (somewhat optimistic here) will remember my post on sustaining chapters and Arvind's wonderful perspective on the same topic. My concerns became more pertinent, as Priyadarshan (PD), whom I considered the bulwark of our chapter, had decided to shun city life and moved on from Mumbai with noble intentions of making a difference to employment levels in some remote districts of Vidharbha region.As an aside, I personally rate PD's step as rather commendable and sometimes believe if his association with SPIC MACAY had the slightest of role in tilting him towards this decision over a corporate career.

I realised that with PD gone and me soon to go, the Mumbai chapter would be left with no 'seasoned' volunteers and activity levels would take a hit. However there was an inherent belief that PD and I had found some new volunteers who were warming uo to the movement. But they could at best be classified as a Bench at that stage - people with immense capabilities and potential but yet to test waters. However now there was no option to let the bench take over the show from us old fogies. The time had come to test the chapter's Bench Strength or the lack of it. Well the Virasat series happened, not without glitches, but happened nevertheless and entirely by this so called bench taking center stage.

Little had we realised that by PD himself leading a group of students to the convention at Kohima, and by keeping them in the loop while planning and executing FEST we were successful in creating a strong bench of volunteers. This bench strength is now running the show in Mumbai. As I write they prepare to conduct a FEST series trying to iron out all glitches they encountered during the Virasat. For they are no longer the Bench but the bulwark of the chapter.

Though I hope they are on their way to adding even more Bench Strength to the chapter

Sustaining college chapters (as i saw it)

First a little background about me: I am Arvind Batra. I am from NSIT, passed out in 2k6, worked in Bangalore for a year and currently doing my masters in CS from Georgia Tech. Quite an active volunteer during NSIT, but mostly at college level. I had tried to contribute to SPICMACAY overall Delhi chapter but was not able to do much. Have been inactive after i came out of NSIT but still following the movement passionately. Here I am because of Harsh.

I liked Harsh's post on sustaining chapters and during NSIT, we had some good discussions/experience which i would like to share. Most of the points below are related to sustaining a college level chapter.

1. Continuity howsoever small it may be helps in a long way. In my final year, there were only 3 of us who were active volunteers and it was on to us to organize the fest, mobilize people, plan and execute. There were some juniors (and very very active too) but they wanted someone to initiate the process. The fall semester saw no events as all of us were busy with placements, gre/mba etc. But in spring we made a genuine effort (kicked our asses) to organize a festival. We started by saying we will organize only 2 events and make it a small scale fest. But as we worked on towards it, we got a lot of support (from juniors as well as from faculty of NSIT), and things began to take shape by themselves. So much so that we had 2 rounds of fest one having 2 concerts and one having 3 including a theatre in fest (which is a rarity). And after that, with each year the size of chapter has increased.

Just to clarify: when i write juniors, i am not alluding to any hierarchy in spicmacay. We had a complete flat organization, all being volunteers, but as the tradition of NSIT goes, some people took individual modules to organize while some got the responsibilty at a macroscopic level to oversee that each module in itself is complete and in sync with others.

2. Communication: We had a almost inactive group spicmacay_nsit usually meant for announcements, and we realized that we needed a group to keep a track of day to day activities. It was named spicmacayNsitAtWork and i think we used it very effectively. All discussions, from poster design/making, artist coordination, food, logistics were posted. People were asked to give feedback, both postive and negattive, what they feel and/or suggest alternatives etc. New people find a platform to raise their voice and be heard.
(On a side note, we made it a point that we all will leave this group after we graduate but the group had so much energy that being a part of it was absoluteluy lovely (and nostalgic); i signed off after 15 months and that too with a stone on my heart)

3. New-bees should attend: We tried a lot that people who were associated for the first time must attend all concerts. In terms of organizing, they were given tasks like green room coordination, picking up artists etc so that they got opportunities to interact with artists. I remember some people sleeping on the stage when artist is performing, but those who remained awake had many "aha" moments of their life in those 2 hrs of space/time.

4. One week of semester or one day in every month? We often had the question in front of us - what would make the model more sustainable - one week of fest in one semester or one concert every month. We wanted to ensure that the momentum should always there. We experimented by having two events spaced 1.5 months apart. As expected, it required twice the effort, twice the energy but one good thing that came out of it that we had many people volunteering for second event than the first one. SPICMACAY was always in the air inside college and there were always questions from faculty/students/staff inquiring about future activities.

5. Audience: It is always a heart breaker for organizers when after putting weeks of effort , there are only 20 people in audience. One of the main reasons cited for not organizing concerts is " whats the point, no one turns up". Some learnings of our PR team were:
(a) Local publicity is highly viral. People living closer if informed had a very good turn up rate.
(b)Personal invites to faculty. Having a volunteer go and invite a faculty made a lot of difference. Faculties used to ask questions about the artist, about the art etc and made a point to turn up for atleast one of the concerts. On a sidenote, volunteers got a valid explanantion for bunking classes :), an excuse sympathized by faculty as well.
(c) Give a lot of effort in poster design. A good poster can make a lot of difference. It does not has to be jazzy but it should not be like a classified advertisment of a newspaper. We invested a week in both concerts to make the poster.
(d) Having a dance or folk module in the middle can boost up audience level in pure vocal/instrumental concerts.

6. Don't be an elitist: This is something that i learnt from my juniors. They participated in SPICMACAY with equal fervor as they did in other festivals. They were everywhere and everyone knew them. So associating with SPICMACAY was seen as associating with any other college festival and then some of them were inspired by the movement and decided to stick to it.

Sustaining Chapters -Creating Volunteer Value

As I try (note the word) to distance myself from the day to day workings of the Bombay chapter, I spend some more time thinking about how the chapter can be taken forward and developed! Also helps me add some colour to the chapter like linkages with the mozilla foundation and enlightening them with download days of firefox - is this what someone meant by saying we should make the Bombay chapter more lively - maybe!.

This was something i never thought about in NSIT (my engineering college), which was my first association with SPIC MACAY. There, I assumed, being a college an organic growth was imminent and it was something that happened on its own. Consequently, I failed miserably at in MICA, due to never thinking about it then.

Experience is the best teacher and I learned that if I need to play an active role in Bombay (something i resisted till I felt there were more committed peopleplaying an active role!)

Priyank soon left and SPIC MACAY fest 2008 approaching and no one who would take the initiative to organise it, I decided this was the time to try and explore the old wine, but in a completely new bottle. So may be how I should savour it should also change.

I knew that there were a couple of people priyank had initiated into the scheme of things, and they could just be told what to do and they would achieve the desired effect of 15 concerts - in say 10 schools/ colleges. But could the same 15 concerts be achieved with a greater impact. I am not really talking about an impact in the city / media etc - but as priyadashan puts it rather nicely - the concerts adding more value to us - the spicmacayites, the volunteers!

A google group to which i kept posting almost felt like I was writing to the wall, making proclamations of revived saturday meetings, which at times evoked some valid cynicism and mockery,organising dinner parties to which practically no one would turn up!Many times I felt that I was trying to weave into a community wide project, a set of simple tasks which i could achieve by simple coordination skills - which SPIC MACAY had taught me in good measure by now!

However, the wall i felt I was talking to soon began to crumble as priyadarshan instantly bought into my ideas about how we work being equally ( I am tempted to say 'more') important than what we achieve!


It is impossible to quantify what we achieved by all this but if I was to put it vaguely, here is a small list -

1.We revived a feel good factor that fans and supporters of spic macay in mumbai had not felt in a long time!

2. We revived a certain volunteer curiosity > Anyone who came forward with an intention to volunteer at any scale, however big or small did not go back disappointed!

3. This interest did not stay limited to the fest series. but a similar exercise for planning and implementing the convention travel by priyadarshan - has had a certain impact on a few more people!

4. As Saturday meetings was not the most viable of things, google groups, documents and things like this blog attempt to replicate the saturday like effects with a greater regularity and with greater width

The key take home from all this being that if we begin with focussing on creating volunteer value, the likelihood of a chapter sustaining will be far greater!

And volunteer value will not come from the end product but the process, the means to achieve the end!

Let me end with a very simple and actionable example that highlights my point- by commenting on this post and hence engaging in an online discussion around it - you will add value to this volunteer's post - and make him count!

cheers
Harsh