How to grow Cochrane membership in your group
Cochrane membership is internationally recognised and is our way to say thank you to the people who contribute. Cochrane groups are often a person’s first introduction to Cochrane, and this guidance will help you to help people get involved. You can also use other resources found in this section including a brochure and a PowerPoint presentation that you can translate and share.
Promote your group’s opportunities
If your group has opportunities for volunteers to get involved, locally or virtually, you can promote these on Cochrane Engage and encourage people to apply. Please see guidance on how to look after your volunteers.
Promote Cochrane opportunities
For our globally available volunteering opportunities - point them to our website. Information about how to volunteer is in the ‘Get Involved’ section.
Entry level opportunities are found on Cochrane Crowd. Our volunteer hub, Cochrane Engage, is a platform that people can search to find a wide variety of opportunities. Our website also has information for potential authors and an application form for becoming a translator.
If you have early career professionals who want to get involved, please signpost them to our Early Career Professionals Network.
If you have patients or members of the public who want to share their lived experience, please direct them to our Patient and Public Network.
How to make sure your volunteers get their membership points
Any volunteering contributions done through our central systems get membership points automatically.
- Crowd - 1 point per record screened
- Engage - 200 points per task completed, plus an extra 500 points if the task is a peer review
- Translation – 1 point for every 2 words translated on Phrase
- Peer review – 500 points
- Authorship – between 3000 and 5000 points on publication
If you haven’t used Cochrane Engage to recruit your volunteers, please make a note of each person’s name, email address and what they have done, and send an email to support@cochrane.org with details. We can then add membership points on an ad hoc basis. Contributions we typically receive from groups are:
- Translation of webpages or podcasts (not done using Phrase)
- Creating promotional materials
- Participation in priority setting exercises
Alternatively, you can ask your volunteers to notify us directly of their volunteering contributions by using the 'Add my contribution' form that can be found in the membership tab of their Cochrane Account. Please note that the support team will ask your group to confirm their contribution before points are awarded.
Some types of volunteering are so integral to a Group that we consider those people should be given a core role in your group, for example people who are editing your website, creating or delivering training. Check out this guidance for more information. In general, we do not add contributions manually for people with a core role.
Volunteers can see a list of their contributions in their Cochrane Account and can download a certificate showing their involvement.