We’re doing great stuff! Want to help?

As we move forward with our 2015 goals, like holding a speaker series, doing live chats, hosting how-to-blog workshops, relaunching the site, and kicking our social media into higher gear, we need more hands.

Becoming a contributor is a great and important way that you can get involved in Greater Greater Washington any time, but if you’d like to help in other ways, right now we could really use assistance with several non-writing elements.

All of the volunteer roles below are ongoing, with a commitment of a few hours per week, every week (except where noted).

Social media: We’re on Twitter and Facebook, but for a long time, nobody on our current team has been able to focus on packaging and sharing our posts on those platforms, and it’s an area that with a little attention, could really become great.

Do you have a flair for social media? Are you willing to take on these accounts? You would monitor them, help our editors and contributors improve their tweets and headlines, and collect some statistics on how we’re doing so we can see where we acn improve.

Events: Our community happy hours and the panel discussions we’re hoping to start on urbanist issues are fascinating and fun, but they do require some work to plan, like securing venues, picking dates, coordinating with speakers, and handling logistical details. If this sounds like your talent, we’d love your help!

Live chats: During last last year’s DC mayoral candidate live chats, we learned one of the most critical components to make it successful: fleet fingers! Our chats require at least 3 incredibly fast (70-90 wpm), accurate typists taking 2-4 hours out of the middle of their day to go to the chat location, prep with their fellow typists and moderator, and then type like their fingers are on fire for an entire hour.

But the good part is, if you’d like to get involved but can’t commit to a weekly task, we can add your name to a file and give you a call when we’re planning a chat.

Expanding our coverage: This one is about writing for us. We’re lucky to have amazing contributors covering a range of issues, but there are issues we’d like to discuss even more

Natalie Wexler and sometimes Dan Reed write about education issues for us in DC and Montgomery County, and our education posts have great readership, but we’d like to do even more coverage of how education impacts the shapes of our cities and neighborhoods.

We’d also like to talk more about affordable housing policies and the experiences people have who live in or need to find affordable units. We talk a lot about the ins and outs of transit or bicycle design, but the economics and stories around housing are also extremely important.

And we’d like more articles about neighborhoods east of the Anacostia and in Prince George’s County as well as in Fairfax and farther-out parts of Virginia. If you live in these communities, what debates are people near you having about the future growth of your area? What do you want to see change? We’d like to share this with our readers.

Consider this our open call to you, and if you’re interested in any of the items above, email us at info@ggwash.org with the subject line, “HELP GGW: [what you want to help with].” If you have questions, post them in the comments, and we the editors will do our best to answer them!