A new Slop University brochure profiles Postdoctoral Fellow Joost Nwosu's interview study of volunteer coordinators, and the Review Cadence Observatory's decision to license their own words as a certified review script.
A new brochure follows volunteer coordinators' account of the annual review into a certified script every licensed review must now recite
Ask a volunteer coordinator what their annual review is actually for, and — according to a new Slop University brochure — the answer is not about being assessed. It is about being thanked. That finding sits at the centre of Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Joost Nwosu’s interview study, and the University has already put it to work.
Dr Nwosu’s study followed volunteer coordinators from sporting clubs, op shops and Landcare groups through their most recent annual review, then asked them afterwards, in their own words, what the conversation had actually done. Almost none described an appraisal. Most described a ritual of gratitude, timed to land just before the next term’s roster needed confirming.
The Review Cadence Observatory has taken the account at its word. Organisations seeking to badge their volunteer review as evidence-based can now license a Volunteer Recognition Script, built directly from coordinators’ own phrasing, which a licensed review must read aloud in full before any operational matter is raised.
The people we spoke with were not being evasive. They were describing, precisely, a different kind of meeting to the one on the calendar.
— Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement
The University frames the script as an act of listening rather than a departure from evaluation, and expects wider licensing to follow as more organisations look to demonstrate that their own gratitude has been peer reviewed.
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.vs481k.