Experiences volunteering with small organizations

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’d like to discuss some peeves I have with my volunteer work, to see if my experience is common or if I’m way out in left field. I’m considering stepping down from my volunteer board seat but I’m not sure if that is appropriate or if I’m making a mountain out of a molehill (I tend to stew on things). If I step down, I think it will be stepping away from any volunteering in the future because I’m seeing a trend and I’m smart enough not to keep repeating mistakes. I would like mostly feedback from others who have volunteered and may have similar experiences. If you have never volunteered and can only say “if it bothers you then just quit” please skip to another thread to read. I really want to talk with people who have hands on experience with volunteer organizations.

I’m treasurer, webmaster, social media manager, fundraising, volunteer recruiter and whatever else I feel like doing for a very small animal charity. The bad thing about nonprofits is that anybody regardless of experience can start one. This is my second board seat in my second small animal charity. I’m seeing a trend that I don’t like.

The person(s) who have a passion for a cause do the paperwork to turn their hobby into a legal 501c3 nonprofit. After that step, they disregard any further governance or professionalism and proceed to run the organization like a hobby or social club. I’m not even talking about cliques even though they sometimes happen. I mean they don’t educate themselves about how to properly run a nonprofit, so they have a very fast and loose way of operating. For example:

[ul]
[li]Instead of recruiting and managing volunteers properly, they just let their friends help out, ignore it when some friends don’t actually do any work, let important tasks go undone because no volunteer steps up to do them, and churn through people a lot because they let disagreements turn into bitter arguments and hurt feelings.[/li]
[li]Don’t worry their pretty little heads about difficult but critical things like proper bookkeeping, reputation management, marketing, donor management. By this I mean they do bizarre stuff like going to the trouble to purchase QuickBooks and then only using the check register, writing up invoices as Word documents and emailing them to the recipients but then never following up to make sure they’re paid, not having the books reviewed by a CPA and filing the IRS Form 990 without a clue whether their numbers are good or bad*. For reputation management, I’ve seen them get into public spats with people online or completely ignore the website and social media. For donor management they think online auctions and selling things is all they need to do, and on the rare occasion when a donor sends big money, they think a thank-you letter is all that’s required. They think that marketing is putting the logo on a tshirt and have no idea that the website and social media are a critical part of marketing.[/li][/ul]

The organization I’m with now is geographically dispersed (different states in the U.S.) and communication is also a huge issue. We have a conference call board meeting about twice a year and all other communication is done by email. Except that I suspect the other board members communicate weekly by phone. They primarily handle the animal transports, fostering and adoption so they really do need to be in constant contact. But they leave me out too much. For example, I’ll get an email telling me to mark a dog as adopted on our website, and I point out that he never was on our website because nobody told me about him. I’m always seeing new animal pictures on Facebook, but they only post on their own personal feeds, not on the organization’s facebook page. We have a process for screening and approving adoption applications but I have read after the fact a few times (again, on Facebook) that a dog I didn’t know we had was adopted to a family we didn’t run through the process.

*Coming back to the bookkeeping thing, since I said I was treasurer, you may be wondering why I don’t fix these issues. I did. We now use Quickbooks invoices and I do follow up on them after a few months, and I educate myself on accounting practices to make sure I’m doing the books right so that our 990 comes out right at the end of the year. But I also have to deal with the founder, who likes to keep her hand in everything, who does the banking and makes the bookkeeping difficult. She chose a bank that has unreadable descriptions on the monthly statement instead of listing the check number, recipient name, or even having check images - and has no interest in changing banks. Which means I have to constantly ask her what transactions were for and who they were to/from before I can reconcile the account at the end of each month. She deposits checks into the account and marks the invoices paid in Quickbooks except that instead of asking me how or figuring it out for herself (you click on “receive payment”, I can’t figure out the difficulty) she just modified the invoices with a negative line item called “paid in full”. So I have to go in and reverse most of what she did and then do it right. She also deposits payments for invoices she never got around to creating and I’m supposed to just know that, so I’ve often recorded them as donations and then had to go back and fix them.

I feel like a rare beast because I have educated myself on the governance required to run a professional organization but most other people have no curiosity about whether they’re doing things right or if there could be better ways to do things. I’m working in a vacuum because my team doesn’t want to bother with that stuff and when I’ve tried gently to tell them how various things should be handled (for example, that the website is a critical marketing tool) they aren’t interested. They’re happy for me, the back office person take care of it all, but of course I can’t govern the entire organization single-handedly while they play with puppies and ignore me. So I’m pretty much done, I think. No one thing outrageous that has me upset, I’m just getting tired of dealing with all of it.

Anybody else here have similar experience and burnout?

2

The non-profit boards that I have and do participate on have to have a bit more professionalism than you describe before I agree to participate. And I have sat on boards ranging from national charity organizations with a paid professional staff, to a local organization with a completely volunteer staff. The first requirement I have is that there is a stated vision and mission statement so that we all know what the purpose of the organization is and its goals. I have seen goal drift occur especially when you get people from various backgrounds serving on the board. This way you can point back to the charter or the mission statement and let people know when objectives start to drift. There also must be an annual accounting and reviewable budget, in most cases I want to see there be an annual audit of the financials as well. There’s too much personal liability risk serving as a director for these types of things to not be in place.

If these types of things aren’t there at a minimum, I don’t even bother considering serving.

3

I have to say the not-for-profits I’ve been associated with have been better organized, as well. (Note, the ones I’ve been with were around years before I got there.) The very least I’d insist on is having two people countersigning checks.

Having someone independently depositing money for invoices that hadn’t even been created yet screams potential for abuse.

4

My experience is not with a nonprofit but with a business that was run in a really slapdash way before my tenure. My boss was hired first and she cleaned up a lot of it, then I was hired and I cleaned up some of the loose ends.

The thing that worries me most about what you are describing is I fear that since you have the label of “treasurer” and are doing some of the accounting, you may end up the person they look to if hinkiness (that’s the official term) is happening. Some of the practices you are describing are not smart (I know you know this), but can also potentially lead to some real issues, potentially with fraud. So document everything. Don’t just clean things up seamlessly; make sure there are records of when you had to clean things up. Don’t patiently fix other people’s mistakes. Make a stink. This protects you and it protects the organization.

5

Thanks guys. Yeah, on the topic of the financial responsibility and accuracy, isnt’ that scary? What gets me is that I’m no super genius. I had one semester of accounting in high school more than twenty years ago and I still know more than the people I took over the books from (in both organizations). How can you start any business, profit or otherwise, if you don’t know the difference between debit and credit or the difference between a vendor, donor and an account name (chart of accounts)?

I think the part that really got under my skin is feeling unappreciated because they clearly don’t care about the work I do. They tell me all the time that I do good work, but how can they even judge that when they obviously don’t know what the website is for and disregard the Facebook page? After I changed the logo on the website and then tried to get some shirt printed with it, they told me not to do the shirts. They told me the old logo was the accepted brand and on all the marketing materials but it’s okay to have it on the website. What the hell do you think the website is?? (I changed it back to the old logo.)

6

This is really common where I’m from (small town, very small, broke organizations) and things I’m involved in. I try to phrase fixing things up in terms of benefits - like “wouldn’t it be nice to just click a button and know how much money we have in the bank” and “does anybody here know when __________ last donated? If we tracked this, we could contact people more effectively” and (this is implied, never said) “it would be great if we didn’t have to spend a couple of extra hours a month trying to fix simple screw-ups!”

And an insurance policy that pays up when officers are criminal or incompetent. Helps with the peace of mind :stuck_out_tongue:

7

I’ve noticed the same things you have and I associate them in particular with animal-associated charities. Someone decided hey, I’ll raise horses and let special needs kids ride them twice a year and get suckers cough other people to pay for me t play with horses the rest of the time. IME, these people are not business people and have no regard for business practices and procedures. So I stay away.

8

Adeste, the only problem with your approach is that in this kind of environment you’ll end up with all of the work on your own shoulders. That’s kind of where I am now: I do all of the “busy” business work, basically the stuff that nobody else has any interest in. And that’s another side of the problem: they have ZERO interest in the website and so never look at it.

If I said something like “wouldn’t it be nice to just click a button and know how much money we have in the bank” they’d all say yes and I’d implement it and nobody would ever click that button except me. Just like when I proposed putting photos of the board members along with a short blurb about each of us on the website, they all said they thought it was a good idea, and then 50% of them sent me a favorite photo to post and 10% of them sent me a blurb. I’ve asked them to send me short write ups of amazing accomplishments they did and they say they’d love to, and never do. It’s really vividly shown that they foster a LOT of animals but never send me any details about them to post online. Like I’m supposed to just magically know…

It’s not that they never do any work. They work very hard acquiring animals, fostering and putting them into adoptive homes. But they have no interest in anything outside of those tasks. Pretty close to what Cub Mistress describes.

9

I’d actually say what you describe is pretty common. I generally volunteer with youth organizations, not animal organizations, but the basic principle is the same: people got into the volunteering because they wanted to help the cute animals or disadvantaged children or the endangered kelp or whatever. They didn’t get into it because they wanted to learn the in and outs of IRS forms or keep up with paperwork or do the financial reconciliation at the end of the month. There’s a reason businesses hire people to do the regulatory/financial/etc stuff - nobody likes to do it unless they’re getting paid. They don’t even like it then, but at least they get money for it.

The other issue is that charities are worried that if they hound their members about doing the paperwork the right way instead of doing the “real work” (i.e. the fun stuff), those members will throw up their hands in disgust, yell “I got into this to help kittens, not to file some taxes!” and quit. Quitting is a real problem with volunteers, because they are using their own time and the only reward is feeling good about it. If your boss tells you to get with the paperwork, sure you won’t enjoy it but we need to eat, which means we need to get paid, which means we need a job, and if the job requires paperwork, we do it. Nobody needs to foster a puppy, so their threshold for non-puppy activities is far lower.

This is not to say what your organization is doing is a good thing (in fact, it’s rather horrifying), but it’s pretty normal in my experience. In my experience, the way to fix it is to convince people they will get more puppy time/kid time/kelp time/whatever if they bother to do these little things. After all, it’s all about the puppies and you wouldn’t want to let one of them fall through the cracks, right? That’s the tack to take.

Well, that, and sometimes it means sucking it up and doing the boring maintenance when nobody else will, or leaving and letting the organization flop around until it fails on it’s own. Where that line of frustration is drawn is a personal thing.

10

I think the only advice I can give is that there is a range of ways small non-profits operate. I wouldn’t give up entirely on volunteering.

I would be choosy about the ones I volunteer for, and ask some pointed questions before agreeing to work for it, based on your past experience. Ask about the bookkeeping and money handling practices. Ask to see the bylaws (hint: if they can’t find a copy of one right away to give to you, walk out right then). There are well-managed ones out there.

11

I’m actually thinking that any nonprofit without any paid staff is going to be a problem, because of the issues you guys raise. The reason I do so much of the back office work is because no other volunteers want to do it, even at the board level. And believe it or not, my current organization has a mission statement and bylaws, and it still operates the way I described! So I think any organization so small that they can’t afford to pay a few critical staffers to do the back office work, then they’re going to be too dysfunctional to bother with. If they can afford a couple of staffers, then they likely use the services of a CPA and understand at least a little about governance.

12

I will start with someone I know. He wanted to work with marine animals, but he profession was in the maintenance field. He got asked to a lot of work on the facilities rather than working with the animals. And he was considering quitting. I suggested to him that he talk to the leadership first. Let them know that he did not want to spend all his time with a wrench in his time especially after 40 hours at work turning wrenches.

My first experience was as treasure of an small auxiliary organization supporting a organization supplying children health needs. I was extremely careful to make sure that I kept all the paper work in order. At the monthly meetings I turned in a “treasures report”, and I made sure the president read over my tally sheets. I also kept a “log” book of activities and expenses, income, donations, or money given to the organization we were supporting. I was anal about it. I wanted to make sure the person after me had no questions about the money in or out. When my tem as treasure was up the membership wanted me to run for the office of president of the auxiliary, and I did. The director of the organization that we were supporting did not want a man heading the auxiliary organization and talked a woman that was not very active with the auxiliary to run against me. As I was being drafted in the first place and not sure I wanted the job and I believed in the work of the organization, I dropped out of the election rather than having it become a sore spot between the auxiliary and the director.

Another organization that I have worked was a 3 day Christian music festable. In the early years we put in long days and extra days setting it up. We would start on Saturday. The rest of the volunteers would get there on Tuesday or Wednesday. When they got there we would have to step aside. We would loose the carts that we were carrying tools and supplies in so the late comers would not have to walk around. They were provide with meals where we would have to provide our own. And after the event the rest of the volunteers would go home on Sunday and we would be tearing down until Tuesday night. We lost a lot of good volunteers over the years hard working men and women. I stayed because I believed in the work we were doing, I saw lives changed.
I kept going to our director and asking him to get changes made. He kept telling me that he tried but he was just one voice on the board. One year we got another new department head. When we were told to give up the golf carts that year he went around our director and straight to the head of the board of directors. Told him it was wrong to expect us to get there early, stay late, carry heavy loads, and not be feed or treated with respect. And he could not guarantee that volunteers would keep returning if there was no change. That year the top guy noticed what we were doing he paid attention. And things changed. Now we have a dedicated team that returns every year.
NOW MY ADVICE
Look at the organization that you are serving. Do you believe in what it is doing and do you believe in the organization. If you do. Then sit down with the top guy land explain what you see wrong. Explain what changes you think need to be done. It might be a good Idea to have a write up using bullets points. Leave a space between each line to make notes. Make a copy sit down with the top guy each with a copy and discuss line by line. It also sounds like in the future there could be questions about how money was handled. You want to be above question and need to stress this. Questions not just from members but from any outsiders. If you can not get thing resolved to where you can be comfortable then it may be time to step back. Don’t quit volunteering, figure what you are passionate about and volunteer in that area.

13

IME yellowjacketcoder has many pearls of wisdom. Piggybacking if I may …

People join charities, or organized clubs, for two reasons: To do the activity, or to do club-politicking/operating. yellowjacketcoder has superbly explained the motivations of the first type of volunteer / member. I’m going to talk a wee bit about the other kind.

As dysfunctional as an organization is where everybody in the hierarchy wants to do the activity, it’s a hell of a lot better than an organization where the leadership team is mostly engaged in an ego contest over who can rule with the ironmost fist over the smallest teapot tempest. Those people are truly the plague of the small scale charity world.

So I’d ask the OP: Why did you join the charity? To do the activity, to engage in ego contests, or perhaps to “make the trains run on time”?

It sounds to me like mostly the latter. Which is a fine and admirable thing to do. Most charities would be far more effective at converting effort and dollars into results if they were well-run. The leverage of effective business practices is astounding. But is totally invisible to charities populated by folks with no relevant life experience. If everybody in charge is an art major with a spouse whose wages pays their bills, those folks can be extremely well meaning and diligent, but they can’t see past either doing the activity or manipulating the club, depending on their interests.

Charities where the members are fairly professional are out there. The issue is that they don’t tend to stay small for long. Their effective procedures are what make them grow. Conversely the ineffectiveness of groups such as you’re with now is the exact reason they remain so stunted years after being founded.

14

Late add:
On a strictly personal level, by far the most dangerous job in the charity world is treasurer of a dysfunctional organization. Any malfeasance or simple ignorant error by anyone can result in criminal and/or reputational liability for you. That’s not a risk to take blithely.

As you’ve seen, your fellow leadership team is not playing with a full deck. You’re underwriting their sloppiness with your life without even collecting a premium. Not wise, IMO.

15

You do NOT want to be the treasurer for this group. You’ll be blamed when it goes south. Don’t just quit the group though, because they’ll say you split with whatever money. Stick around for a while as a non-treasurer before you leave.

16

All the replies are good, but this one is particularly sage. I joined the organization to “make the trains run on time” and perhaps idealistically, to grow the organization. I think the divide between “doing the activity” and “making the train run on time” is particularly acute in this organization because of our mission statement. The mission statement is split into (too many, in my opinion) bullet points but the two primary ones are:

  1. public education to work toward cultural change and funding our parent organization
  2. taking animals from our parent organization to relieve population pressure and putting them into adoptive homes

I see my fellow board members working solely on #2 and don’t seem to care much about the first. I very firmly believe that if we only do #2, we will never solve the problem. I agree that it’s a Very Large problem, cultural change does not get solved in a year or five or even a decade - it takes a generation or three. But I am realistic about that and take the long view. So that is a fundamental divide between me and my fellows.

Interestingly, I have wondered how you grow from a little org into a bigger organization with staff and a policy manual. I think you nailed it, and we really are never going to get there because I am apparently the only person with organizational effectiveness and growth in mind. I’ve wondered if I took things too seriously. Now with your feedback, I think I’m the only sensible person in a group of hobbyists.

The sad thing is that there are no large, well-governed organizations out there working on this precise issue. We have many “sister” organizations but they are all run the same way we are. Since we work in the international arena, I did once reach out to HSI (Humane Society International) and spoke to one of their board members. They were very familiar with our target issue but it’s not one of their programs, nor did they seem interested in working on it. The advice they gave me was that only the local people could solve their problem - which I sort of agree with, but I do think outsiders could help with funding and educational materials. But… well, I can’t force them to take an interest.

17

Yes, and yes - also animal rescue. I read thru each bullet point you posted and nodded my head. When we ran out of volunteers (and money), the org folded - we were fostering a dog at the time & basically told we could either keep him or take him to the local pound. He’s having dinner in the kitchen at the moment. :slight_smile:

I shifted my volunteer focus to a local assisted living facility/nursing care center - more professional & more organized. If you want to stay involved in animal rescue, would volunteering with the local Humane Society/ Animal Care organization funded by the local government be an option?