You’re interested in volunteering?  Thank you so much!  

If you just want to sign up and aren’t looking to read all the details, go to our volunteer form to sign up!

But if you’re looking for specific details on how our volunteers contribute, read on.

Our promise to volunteers

Mañanacon will treat volunteers with respect and thankfulness befitting their commitment to the convention.

Our volunteers are usually our core committed convention attendees, and we want the experience to be rewarding and sustainable.

Community-driven organizations can become overly dependent on volunteer work, and then be caught off-guard when critical volunteers burn out or leave the convention for personal reasons.  This is very disruptive when it happens and we don’t want that to happen for MañanaCon.

With that core philosophy in mind, these are our principles for volunteer labor.

Principle 1: We commit to providing sustainable volunteer opportunities.  

Volunteering should not lead to burnout for the individual.  If the tasks are overly time-consuming or difficult, the convention will work with the individual to reduce the scope of the volunteering.

If you’re a volunteer and you feel yourself getting burned out, please come to Paul and Tara!  We’ll find a way to allow you to scale your commitment back to a healthy level.  We would rather have you as a happy attendee than an unhappy volunteer.

Principle 2: All work done by volunteers will be “nice-to-have,” not critical to the convention’s success.

Volunteers are not employees, and work that is crucial for the convention’s success should be done by paid convention staff. Critical work includes accounting, managing key vendor relationships, strategic planning, and more. Non-critical work includes one-time activities like running games, helping at the front desk, creating name tags, and more.

Principle 3: Volunteer work will be a way to contribute to the convention, not a shortcut to free or reduced admission or other perks.

Our volunteers are interested in supporting and growing this community and donate their time and resources to help it grow.

In some cases, we will offer volunteers free tickets, swag, or other perks.  However, the monetary value of this will always be significantly lower than the value of the volunteer’s time, even at minimum wage.

Simply put, if the reason you want to volunteer is that you see it as an easy way to get free admission or perks, you will likely find it to be a bad trade.

We would love to be able to offer more, but the current financial reality of the convention is that we can’t offer significant compensation for volunteer work.  This is why we’re so committed to keeping our volunteer work sustainable (See principle #1).

In the long term, we hope to convert more of our volunteer work into compensated work done by convention staff.  As that happens, individual volunteers will be asked to convert to paid employees/contractors at that time.  We value people’s time and we believe this to be a fairer and more sustainable arrangement as the convention grows.

All that said, we are open to ideas!  If you have a big idea that you believe is an exceptional amount of work but would be worth the effort for the convention, please reach out on our volunteer form!  We would love to see if we can mobilize other volunteers or find another way to make it sustainable for you.

I love MañanaCon!  Where do I sign up to volunteer?

Please fill out our volunteer form here to sign up!