From Volunteer to Staff: Transitioning Without Losing Steam

Matt Singer is the CEO of Forward Montana, a home-grown non-profit that trains, mobilizes, and elects new progressive leaders in Montana.

When Forward Montana started back in 2004, we were an all-volunteer operation. At the beginning, we also thought it likely that we would stay that way. The core group had skills -- raising big checks was not one of them.

So we worked in coalition to move from youth voter turnout by phones to using doors instead. And then we launched a giant confirmation battle targeting the student member of the board of regents and won -- something that hadn't been done in 20 years, much less by a volunteer operation.

There's an energy to volunteer operations, including campus groups, where people who aren't making any money feel empowered to make the decisions regarding what the organization does. Strangely enough, getting staff can almost kill that initiative. When you're all going broke for the love of it, there's solidarity. When people start getting paid, it's easy to establish unnecessary hierarchies and for others to assume that the people getting paid can get the work done.

I'm not going to pretend that I've got the answers to this issue -- of how to maintain the passion and energy of volunteer operations once paid staff enters the picture. At Forward Montana, we're grappling with this issue -- and I'd love feedback and ideas in comments. But I've got some thoughts on what the problems might be:

• Bureaucratic decision-making processes. Once organizations get staff, it's easy to try to maintain "grassroots" involvement by moving things through committees or board decisions. Instead, when a new volunteer wants to step up and launch a new effort through the organization, this decision-making by committee becomes a set of hoops to jump through rather than a support network to make change happen.
• Unempowered volunteers. In a lot of cases (hopefully), paid staff are paid because they have more experience and achievement in the relevant work than the volunteers (exceptions would be organizations managed by a board or other volunteers, but with support staff). That can lead to a tendency to regularly correct and change what volunteers are doing. Some of this is good -- it's called training. But taken too far, it's micro-managing and it's inefficient for the staff (who could be spending time elsewhere) and disempowering for volunteers.
• Lack of training. Volunteer-run organizations have few compliance problems. If you truly have no staff, you probably have few, if any, commitments to the IRS, the FEC, state regulators, and Departments of Labor. Bring in staff and become a bigger operation, you're both entering a new level of complexity and a new status as target for anyone who opposes what you're doing. When it comes to the details of federal campaign finance law or tax code distinctions between 501c3/501c4/527/PAC, it's easy for anyone to get in over their head. For volunteers with no training, it's a virtual guarantee. And this is only one piece -- training opportunities for volunteers are few and far between, especially when it comes to anything more difficult than knocking a door or calling a voter.

What other problems face volunteer-powered organizations with staff?

Before we start looking for solutions, anyone want to help me figure out the problems?

I'm on staff side, I'd love to hear from volunteers about frustrations working with organizations.