How Volunteer Organizations Work — And Why They Don’t by Jonathan Crowe
The OHS News 87 (Dec. 2000)

I’ve been volunteering my time for various organizations since I was sixteen. (That was silly of me, I know.) I’ve held executive positions on volunteer boards for about as long. By the time I was twenty I was cynical enough about it that I composed a little document called Crowe’s Laws of Meetings, which distilled all the wisdom I purported to have gleaned from several years of witnessing the shenanigans that took place at board meetings. “All meetings start fifteen minutes late”, “It’s easier to criticize someone else’s work than do your own — and at a meeting it’s hard to tell the difference”, and so forth. I lost the document years ago and I wish I hadn’t.


Now this has nothing to do with the board meetings of the OHS (really!), but thinking about this makes me think about what some of those organizations were trying to do — when they weren’t figuring out new ways to impeach each other, that is. The greatest concern of any executive board on which I served was how to get the membership more involved in the activities of that organization. It seemed to us that no matter what we could come up with, trying to get the membership to “get involved” only seemed to leave us frustrated. Executive members are usually pretty committed to the cause (otherwise they wouldn’t be on the board), and so it’s easy to forget why someone not so committed would shell out the money to join an organization, and yet not participate. One mistake frequently made (which I think became Crowe’s Law Number 13) was to spend much newsletter space and meeting time begging the membership to get involved. In my opinion this always backfired: the more you ask the membership to get involved, the more you turn them off, I thought. Still, the frustration was understandable: we’d organize these big meetings and only a few people would turn up. (Nowadays I think a turnout of 10% or more of the membership is pretty good. If you think 15-20 people at an OHS meeting isn’t all that hot, try having only 15-20 people turn up, out of a total membership of 1,400!)

The greatest challenge of any volunteer organization is what to do with its best resource: its members. How to get them, how to keep them, and how to make use of them. I think it’s a lot easier to attract new members than to keep the ones you have. A measure of success might be how many members end up paying for a second year’s membership dues. New members are probably the easiest to get active in an organization’s volunteer projects. The trick, both for the oldtimers who’ve been doing it forever and for the new blood, is to avoid mass burnout. Every volunteer needs a rest once in a while, but if too few try to do too much, they may all burn out at once — then what?

So the question is not how to attract new members, but how to keep them and integrate them into the organization. In any new batch of members there will be some who are dead keen on volunteering lots of their time. The problem is figuring out what to do with them. Some organizations don’t have a clue.

I’ll use myself as an example. About the same time I joined the OHS, I also joined a province-wide support group for the medical condition from which I suffer. Now, as you might have figured out by now, I’m a chronic volunteer — whenever I join an organization, I’m always keen to work for it. And when I sent them my application for membership and my money, I said as much. Put me to work, I told them. It took them three months to process my membership, and apart from their newsletters, none of which were very interesting (a little too much on the clinical side, a little too repetitious), the only time I heard from them was when it was time to renew my membership. I got a rather snippy form letter (in the why-don’t-you-care vein) and a phone call. I bet you wouldn’t be surprised if I told you that I didn’t renew my membership. The point is, this should have been a no-brainer. They could have put me to work — the association doesn’t have a contact in Ottawa, for example. They didn’t suggest it, and they didn’t ask for my help, just my money. So I slipped through their fingers.

Even if I hadn’t been keen on volunteering, they could have done more. This organization did not consider what I think is the most important thing a board can do for its members: make sure they think they’re getting their money’s worth. Basically, they failed to give me a compelling enough reason to send in that second year’s membership cheque.

Now what does getting your money’s worth mean? It’s not just a matter of what each member receives in return (such as a subscription to a newsletter), but also whether the organization does things that the member supports. The National Geographic Society has millions of members, and you can bet that the overwhelming majority of them are in it for the magazine. Membership in a society like this, as it is for many scholarly organizations, is basically an excuse to get the magazine, journal or newsletter. The fact that the organization sponsors all sorts of activities is probably a side bonus — something the membership approves of, but not the key factor that made them join.

With other successful volunteer organizations, those activities are the incentive to join — think of Amnesty International or environmental groups. People join because they support the work the organization does; the publication is nice but not the key factor.

My guess is that supporting the operations of the organization, or supporting the society itself, is the worst reason for membership. Granted, there are expenses, but it’s what an organization does, not what it is, that gets people to join — and stay.

So, what are we going to do next?

Note: This article has not been updated since its first publication. As a result, some of the facts referred to in the text may now be out of date.