We decided to appoint 2 co-leaders every 3 months to make sure meetings are taking place regularly and that programming is meaningful to the ERG members. They aren’t responsible for running individual meetings, but they are in charge of making sure there is a dedicated person to run each meeting. We chose to have 2 co-leaders instead of 1 so that we’d still have a leader even if one of them is out of office.
We discussed a few options for choosing people to run individual meetings:
Set up a rotating schedule. All members would be on the rotation, but they can opt-out and find a replacement for their assigned meeting. Each member can choose what they want to present during the meeting.
Pros: Everyone takes an active role in contributing programming for the group. This prevents the burden from falling on a few members.
Cons: Some people might be uncomfortable being put on a regular schedule and would rather play a more passive role in the group.
Find volunteers for each meeting. Members can add topic ideas to a voting table and upvote topics and activities. Members would volunteer to lead discussions for each topic or activity.
Pros: It’s easy to prioritize the most popular topics and activities.
Cons: If no one volunteers to lead meetings, the point person ends up having to chase down people to lead sessions.
Create a schedule upfront and have members sign up to lead sessions. This is a hybrid version of the first two options. Members use a voting table to choose discussion topics and activities. The leaders create a 3-month schedule based on the voting results, and members sign up to lead sessions.
Pros: The schedule is determined up front so that the co-leaders don’t need to find volunteers every week. It also makes it easier to encourage different people to volunteer so that the burden won’t fall on a few members.
Cons: Having a pre-determined schedule makes it a bit harder to have impromptu meeting topics and isn’t as flexible when accounting for members leaving or joining the group.
At Coda, we decided to go with option 3 because we wanted to encourage members to lead discussions on topics that interested them. By creating a schedule upfront and having everyone sign up at once, we hope to avoid needing to chase down volunteers to lead sessions every week.
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ERG Leaders