Basically, to make your proposals more effective you need to ask specific people for specific help.
- Ask for help with specific well defined tasks.
- Ask specific users for help. The smaller the group of people to whom the requests are addressed, the higher the likelihood that people will respond to the requests.
- When asking for help, create a logical connection between the success of an initiative and something that the target users value.
- Ask for help from those users who are interested in the tasks you are suggesting to work on and have all the necessary skills to complete it.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.