What should an initiative proposal have to be more compelling users of an online community?
Tl;dr; One of the way to do so is to make the work of volunteers visible to the other users
When you want to persuade users to participate in an initiative, you can use the social proof heuristic. To do this, make sure that users see that there are other users who take some actions you are asking for in the initiative. Highlight the most active users who are participating in initiatives in digests, interview them about their personal experiences, share progress metrics with the community, etc. The fact that some users are participating gives the others confidence that the proposed initiative has a chance to succeed and encourages the desire to join themselves.
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.