When a volunteer signs up at Social Coder I send them a welcome message.
Here's my confession: I will probably have sent that exact same message to someone else in the past.
At the moment I personally click on the "new message" button, fill out the name, paste in the message, double-check I'm sending it from a socialcoder email address, and then I send it.
This "welcome" process would be trivial to automate and yet I hesitate to do so.
Robots (and scripts) also have a way of blundering into situations that humans would avoid but this isn't why I'm reluctant to automate.
When it comes down to it I don't want to take the human (me) out of the loop. It would feel like I'm duping the recipient who might naturally expect a human connection rather than a recorded message.
If the volume was very much higher I might - apologetically - automate the welcome message. It might not make any difference to the volunteers signing up, but it would make a difference to me.
Here's my confession: I will probably have sent that exact same message to someone else in the past.
At the moment I personally click on the "new message" button, fill out the name, paste in the message, double-check I'm sending it from a socialcoder email address, and then I send it.
This "welcome" process would be trivial to automate and yet I hesitate to do so.
Robots (and scripts) also have a way of blundering into situations that humans would avoid but this isn't why I'm reluctant to automate.
When it comes down to it I don't want to take the human (me) out of the loop. It would feel like I'm duping the recipient who might naturally expect a human connection rather than a recorded message.
If the volume was very much higher I might - apologetically - automate the welcome message. It might not make any difference to the volunteers signing up, but it would make a difference to me.