How you can help with the CoCo mission

From a CoCo leadership perspective, one of the great things about showing up to Scrabble tournaments in person - aside from, y'know, getting to direct and play the crossword game we all know and love - is the chance to see people face to face and, for lack of a better word, network with them. You get to have in-depth conversations with members of the player community, which gives you a real chance to find out how we can better serve them... and sometimes, vice versa. Sometimes, you find out that people can serve us.

It happens quite a bit, especially at the larger tournaments like your Word Cups and your New Orleanses - people approach me, or another CoCo leadership person, and they ask, "I want to volunteer with you guys! What can I do to help?"

It means the world to us when people ask. It's incredibly gratifying to find that there are Scrabblers out there willing to give their time, their energy, and even in some cases their money to our organization. And these individuals can potentially make a huge difference. After all, everything we do runs on volunteer work. Finding people willing to step up and help is absolutely fundamental to what we do.

There's just one problem though, and I'm speaking solely for myself on this part - I often get tongue-tied when I'm asked this question. I'm at a tournament; I'm distracted, I'm stretched thin. I'm still obsessing over that pairings crisis I was dealing with earlier (if I'm directing) or that endgame I just blew (if I'm playing). And I don't have a ready-made answer that I can whip out on the spot. So what ends up happening is, people ask, "How can I volunteer?" and I stammer back at them something like, "Ummmmmmm, uh, ummm, let me get back to you..."

Rest assured, though, there are many valid answers to that question. So for today, I thought: Let's compile a plethora of said answers and put them all here in one big, organized place. From henceforth, this can be a point of reference for future CoCo helper-outers.

Have you ever thought to yourself, "I'd love to volunteer in some capacity for the CoCo. I wonder what I could do?" Well, here are a whole bunch of ideas.

Directing tournaments. I say this all the time, but it bears repeating all the time: The most important thing that a Scrabble organization can do is run Scrabble tournaments. It sounds obvious, but it's crucial. We can never have enough tournaments, and we can never have enough good people willing to run tournaments.

If you want to grab the reins and run a whole event yourself, that's great. If you only want to tackle one portion of the directing workload - scouting locations, organizing logistics, handling pairings and director calls on the day of - that's great too! We are happy to matchmake and put you together with collaborators you can work with. In any event, if you have any interest in any sort of directing role, be it large or small, talk to us. We would love to work with you.

Working on the tech side. If you have any sort of experience writing code, or doing other sorts of tech-savvy work, we could almost certainly use your help. Our tournament interface is an ever-evolving project, and there are quite a few features we would like to add, just haven't gotten around to it.

There are all sorts of other tech projects, too. We'd love to streamline our website; we might even want to create a CoCo mobile app someday. There is plenty of worthwhile stuff to be done - all we need now is people to do it.

Managing money. Running a Scrabble organization means handling approximately a kajillion little financial transactions each year. Every time someone enters a tournament, we process an entry fee. We collect the money, log it in a budget spreadsheet, record it in a ledger, and so on. The same goes for every refund, every prize, every donation, everything.

It's a lot of busywork, but it's busywork that makes the Scrabble world go 'round. All of these little transactions, collectively, make the whole tournament infrastructure possible. And we're grateful for every little bit of volunteer assistance with it we receive.

Communications and marketing. For one thing, we publish a blog on this site - like, y'know, the one you're reading right now - every Monday. We would happily welcome more writers who wanted to contribute their musings on the Scrabble world. (I swear, it's not by design that I write 95% of the posts here myself. It's just sorta been that way lately.)

Beyond that, we would love to have help producing all sorts of other content - be it social media stuff, streams, YouTube videos, anything. Content is king, no doubt - but we need people who are willing to take that throne.

Growth. We are serious about growing the CoCo and growing the Scrabble community, and we have all sorts of projects in mind to help us achieve that. For example, we're starting to explore grants, we would definitely appreciate anyone who has expertise in grant writing, grant management, and/or fundraising.

We have tons of other ideas for growing the game, including Taproom Takeovers, Scrabble events targeted at youth, sponsoring Scrabblers to compete in spelling bees, and more. We lack the human resources right now to organize and launch these in-person initiatives - but it's definitely an area we have in mind for the future.

As you can see, we've got a lot of ideas in mind for anyone who wants to volunteer for us - but it's also important to note that this list is by no means exhaustive. And we're always open to new ideas.

So, long story short: If you have any interest in helping with the CoCo mission, in any capacity, please do get in touch. We'd love to hear from you. We'd love even more to work with you.