why are chat quotas necessary ?
Can someone please tell me why chat quotas are needed to talk to teens and other listeners and explain the reasoning behind it why do listeners have to send 300 messages a month in order to maintain a badge and give support to other listeners and what if the person your talking to is venting (such as being upset and venting about a chat) and so you get messages that are paragraphs long do we ask them to please break it up because were trying to reach a quota ? or just dont say anything and avoid that person and look for someone who puts out more messages so we can make the quota? because 300 messages isnt a small amount and when you factor in the amount of time it takes if messages are longer a listener must modify the amount of words in their messages and try to encourage short messages with the person theyre talking to which would be awkward right?
If we need to manage our time and meet this quota as anyone meeting a quota must do listeners have to think about the amount of messages sent we dont really have control over how many messages someone else sends or how long each message is unless you talk to that person and ask them to increase the frequency and put less words in the messages so there will be more sent why to maintain the peer support badge its 10 LL chats and the teen badge its only 4 what on earth is the reasoning behind that ?
There obviously is a tracker but its not shared with the listener who must manage their time to make this quota instead were given ideas how to best manually keep track of each of the hundreads of messages https://www.7cups.com/forum/ListenerCommunityCenter_38/AdminCorner_1627/HaveyoulostyourteenbadgeduetotheautoremovalsystemCheckoutthispost_172440/
I really want to know the necessity of chat quotas and the rationale behind having a listener waste so much time trying to manually keep track of each message when an automated tracker exists
The community team invests a significant amount of time training volunteers to ensure everyone is on the same page and well trained. We have volunteer quotas to ensure that the folks in their roles are actually doing them. They are necessary for ensuring an active volunteer team. If you are unhappy with them, i am sorry for that. We made sure they are reasonable to hit! Thank you for being a volunteer.
@Laura so quotas are necessary " to ensure that the folks in their roles are actually doing them " thats an interesting concept that a listener is not doing something if its less than some arbitrary number
so much for self care and encouraging listeners to find a healthy work/volunteer life balance that works for them individually but thanks for the response
We do want to encourage self-care and a healthy balance, however possible, it's something we still try to emphasize. It's why when it was introduced, everyone provided feedback to see what's doable or not.. I do understand, however, your concerns on why there are quotas for roles, how listeners should be able to do what they can without worrying about it, and there can be more than one reasoning behind it. I'll speak about the teen badge, the quota was introduced with a few other roles that have quotas last year November since we want to be able to keep track of current listeners/members. We would want teens to be able to see active adult-teen listeners, active in a sense that they are able to know you are active within the last month and not over 6+ months where a chance of getting a response is low. Also, certain posts that are related to adult-teen listeners (for example looking to host special events, projects etc), if they are needed to be aware of something, then at least we can have a tag list on hand with current ones to be up to date about anything teen related.
Within chats, there won't always be quick responses back and forth to be able to get 1 chat, that's okay, it's a build-up of messages within the chat that you'll find will count up. If you take chats often, it does add up eventually and if it'll help, I can do a reminder mid-month to check in how where you are with chats.
If there has been some error where you've done 4 chats but it still disappeared, then there is a form you can fill out if you've lost it, as well as for other roles that have quotas on it.
@Yendi
nicely said yendi!!!
Quotas can seem overwhelming but most are pretty easy to hit! The quotas also ensure people who do roles are active in their role so that when other listeners or members reach out to people in specific roles they can count on them being active on the team! Without quotas you wouldn't know who was on the team or who is active in their role. Admin and team leaders are super nice if you need self-care and they will restore badges. But also if you are inactive for a long time then it makes sense to redo training because the role could have changed and you need to be up to date on all the proccedures and the new role guidelines! If the quota is too much, then maybe it's time for self-care!
@summertimeSamness a quota may be easy for you personally to hit or easy for some people but you can only speak for yourself not for anyone else what may be easy for you is a challenge for someone else for someone who doesnt have the same life as you they have to manage their time and get control over the different aspects to meet the quota every month so that they can work it into their life and meet the goal each month if its just left up to chance and people you have no control of you might meet the quota or you might not
a member can see how active a listener is (or another member) simply by looking on their profile it will say " Last Active " and say either within the last week or will say something else if they are not active a listener without a certain badge will also have this info on their profile letting people know how active they are so that reasoning that listeners must complete 300 messages per month in order to show as "active within the last week" is simply not true badges and quotas to maintain them does nothing but cause a listener stress and this quota scheme is a pointess waste of time and waste of limited resources and volunteer energy and its not at all necessary unless the goal of 7cups is just to make everything as complicated and waste everyones time as much as possible (and sometimes i wonder)
instead of typing out will copy and paste below a comment i just made in the above thread/link i gave about the teen badge and quotas just to same myself time and energy ;)
yes true a listener can look on their profile at the amount of thats they have at the beginning or middle of the month to know how many overall chats theyve completed and kind of teep track overall but it doesnt specify whether the chat was with a member or listener (now your saying that it doesnt really matter at all how many teens you talk to you can have 4 conversations with an adult and itll count toward maintaining the teen badge so the requirement is rather pointless if thats the case and this thread misleading) but the chat tracker you have on your profile shows chats youve had with members and listeners combined so really the only way is to manually calculate how many listeners and how many teens (or adults) you talk to meaning count each message (30-1chat) and keep track that way
even though there is a tracker thats hidden from the very listener whos trying to reach the quota that calculates how many teens(or adults) and seperately how many listener conversations youve had - but of course a tracker doesnt fix the problem of listeners not having control over the length or frequency of messages sent by other people to be sure you can meet the quota the only thing a listener could do is maybe avoid people who send longer messages or talk to the person and ask them to break up the messages they send because your trying to meet a quota but other than doing one of those two things a listener doesnt have control over the frequency or length of messages that other people send so i guess thats what a listener would need to do to manage this quota requirement
but someone should edit the requirement and this thread to make it truthful and not misleading that the system doesnt know a teen from an adult so really the requirement is 4 L-M chats per month the system cannot identify a L-T chat so why put that as a requirement and cause the listener to worry about it
Seems to me this is just one example of a systemic problem at 7 Cups. We identify an issue in the community, and we have trouble fixing it within the community, so we try to fix the community issue using software. But the software is badly designed and fails to address the issue. And in addition the software has bugs that there is resistance to fixing.
In this case the community issue is that some people get a badge and then move on to other things. After they move on, they are never available to do the thing they got the badge for. This means anyone searching for someone to do that thing finds it difficult, because there are a lot of people who have the badge but won't help.
We tried to fix this community issue using software, but the software is badly designed. It removes badges from people who are actually using the badge in their work at 7 Cups. We've had to make a collection of offsite forms to fill in so we can manually correct the mistakes made by the software. Also, the software doesn't tell anyone what it's doing. It just generates an occasional alert containing limited information.
And the software has a bug, in the case of the Teen badge, that prevents it from counting chats with teens, but although the bug has been widely known for a long time, and it would be easy to fix, fixing it just never seems to happen.
In my view the most important thing is that we fix the systemic problem at 7 Cups. If that's too hard, then at least design software that really addresses the community's badge issue without making mistakes that have to be fixed manually.