Lessons Learned from Serving in a Volunteer Non-Profit

Some tips to help other non-profit leaders

Andres Rodriguez
Aug 8, 2017 · 10 min read

For the past 4 years I have served in the executive team of my fraternity, La Unidad Latina, Lambda Upsilon Lambda Fraternity, Inc. (“LUL” for short). During this tenure, I learned a lot about the challenges that Volunteer-managed Non-Profit Organizations (VNPO) face. Prior to my current role as Officer of Operations, I served in a regional role and before that, served in various roles within my chapter. In these 10 years since I joined the organization, all of the work that I have put in was done for free.

Unlike much larger organizations, LUL does not have the funds to pay for an executive staff, so our team consists strictly of volunteers. As a VNPO, we face unique struggles when it comes to the management of our organization.

In a 2012 study entitled Challenges facing Volunteer-Managed Nonprofit Organizations with Non-Bureaucratic Governance and Non-Hierarchical Structures (translation: Issues facing Volunteer-led Non-Profits), the following challenges were identified as being specific to VNPOs:

  1. Nondemocratic individuals (i.e. members that subscribe to traditional bureaucratic ways of working)
  2. Environmental constraints (e.g. the pressure to drift from the core mission in pursuit of meeting funding requirements)
  3. Lack of succession planning and recruitment
  4. Unreliable task completion
  5. Minimal socialization and engagement
  6. Pressure to achieve consensus
  7. Administrative issues

My intent behind writing this article is to touch on each of the above challenges as well as some others that are likely not unique to LUL. I hope that the lessons learned from these challenges may assist others who are facing similar struggles, within or without the American fraternity system.

In no particular order, here’s what I’ve learned:

Everyone has varying levels of commitment.

One of the most important things to understand before taking any sort of leadership role within a VNPO is that each one of your colleagues has a life outside of the organization — most will have a full-time job, some will have families, some will be in school — so not everyone will be able to commit the same amount of time to their role. Unlike a paid position, where the basic need of income ensures that at least the minimum amount of work is performed, in a VNPO, there is really nothing keeping an individual there aside from their own intrinsic motivation to support the organization. As a result, this must become the fuel that keeps the engine running.

You should read this.

In his book Drive, Dan Pink makes the case that once the basic financial needs of an employee is met, any additional carrot-and-stick approaches to motivate that employee will be ineffective (and in some cases have the opposite effect). Instead, there are three needs that must be met in order for an employee to become intrinsically motivated in his or her role:

  1. Doing purposeful work,
  2. Having sufficient autonomy within their role, and
  3. Developing mastery within their skill set.

This is even more true when dealing with volunteers in management roles. Since there is no financial incentive, meeting the above needs must instead become the focus.

In order to meet these needs, my recommendation is to do the following:

  1. Codify the values of the organization. Most volunteer non-profit organizations are already purposeful, but many do not have guidelines that ensure that the work that is being done is in service to that purpose. By codifying a set of values that aligns with the purpose of the organization and repeatedly referencing them, not only will it help ensure that the work being performed is purposeful, it will have the added benefit of increasing the likelihood that the staff holds themselves and each other accountable to those values.
  2. Have clearly-defined roles and allow each individual to operate autonomously within their role(s). The basic duties of each role — those things that are consistent and unlikely to change often — should be documented clearly and available for anyone to look up. The domains of those roles — those areas or systems that the role has ownership of — should be included in those role descriptions. While they should be encouraged to seek advice from others whenever they deem it useful, each individual should be free to make any decision that falls within the scope of their role without asking permission.
  3. Provide each team member the freedom to pursue their own interests within their role. It should be clear to each staff member that they are free to pursue any work that they deem interesting, as long as it is in service to the purpose and goals of the organization. By leveraging each individual’s unique strengths, you will find that some of the most innovative and impactful contributions will come from members who decide to take on a task that might not necessarily fall within their role, but which is highly interesting to them and allows them to develop mastery in a certain skill.

By implementing the above practices, not only will you allow for greater commitment from your volunteer staff, but you will also be able to reduce or eliminate several of the challenges that were listed earlier.

A singular, focused vision is required in order to make progress.

While having all of the above will ensure that volunteers are engaged, it will not ensure that the work that is being done is moving the organization in the right direction. Many organizations strive to do too much; this can be especially crippling in a VNPO when there aren’t enough people to make significant headway in multiple pursuits.

By having one clear — and most importantly — shared vision, you can ensure that everyone on the team is working in the same direction.

Why a shared vision? Well, if not everyone believes in the vision, then you’ll end up with some individuals either doing their own thing (because it interests them more), or you’ll have someone actively working against you (a saboteur), which can cause all sorts of problems. In order to maximize inertia, you need everyone to agree to the direction in which the organization should head.

Traditional top-down management doesn’t work.

As many for-profit companies are beginning to realize, in an age where change is the only thing that is constant, operating in a hierarchical organizational model in which information flows up and decisions flow down simply does not work. It causes the organization to become sluggish and incapable of responding to threats in an appropriately rapid manner.

This is even more true in the case of VNPOs, since most executive staff members simply do not have the time or bandwidth to deal with issues beyond the scope of their own work. As several of us found out, trying to deal with issues at a chapter level quickly becomes overwhelming and distracting, especially when one is so far removed with what is happening “on the ground”. The best approach is to minimize bureaucracy by allowing for decisions and oversight to be made as close to the problem as possible. Which leads me to my next point, which is that…

Choosing the right leaders is critical.

This is one of the most important points I want to make. You cannot have someone leading the executive team (or any other management team) that believes himself to be a dictator. I cannot stress this point enough. A VNPO must operate democratically in order to function properly.

The president/executive director needs to understand and embrace the role of a navigator — not of an admiral. A navigator understands where the destination is and helps guide the ship towards it. They do not try to tell others how to do their job or demand obedience when someone disagrees with their views. Everyone hates a micro-manager, and in this particular context, the presence of such a person in a leadership role is certain to guarantee conflict, infighting, and dysfunction. Remember: everyone is a volunteer, so they have no reason to stick around in a role that is likely to cause them stress and grief.

Instead, these individuals should possess the one characteristic that I believe is critical in any leader: humility. A great leader must be capable of casting aside their ego and recognizing that they do not know everything. They must trust their team and be willing to rely upon the team’s shared knowledge and individual expertise. They must serve only to ensure that each team member is able to work effectively in their role towards the singular vision of the organization.

Face-to-face time is invaluable.

This point primarily addresses the challenge of minimal socialization and engagement. When your staff is comprised of individuals that are located across the country, the ability to meet in person becomes a luxury. However, it cannot be overstated how important it is to have the staff actually meet and get to know one another. As completely virtual companies like Zapier and Buffer have discovered, the bonds that are created when team members are allowed a space in which they can come together, socialize, and build a rapport has an immense impact in the ability of the team to be able to work together effectively. These retreats should happen at least once a year, and more often if possible.

During the in-between periods, try to make every meeting a video conference. Tools like Zoom or Google Hangouts can allow you to do this for free or at little cost.

An example of a Zoom conference call

Grooming a successor will guarantee continuity.

Most VNPOs have a fairly high level of turnover within their leadership roles — this can be due to many factors, but from my experience, it’s usually due to burnout. Oftentimes it can feel like you’re working two jobs but only getting recognition and pay for one. A normal person can only deal with this for so long before they need a break. And when the day comes that you decide to step down, you want to ensure that the person to replace you has the knowledge and skills to continue building on what you’ve accomplished.

With this in mind, it’s vital that during your tenure, you find someone within the organization who shares your interest in the type of work you do. Not only will this provide you with someone who is ready and willing to assist with projects, it will ensure that you have a successor in mind when you begin thinking about departing your role.

There are various ways to recruit such an individual. For us, there developed an unofficial pipeline that has helped us identify such individuals. Typically, when a member has graduated from school and wants to stay involved, they run for a regional officer position. Each of these roles has a counterpart at the national level, so identifying a potential successor is as easy as reaching out to those individuals.

Other times, members may just pop up out of nowhere because they see work that is being done and they want to help out where they can (this is also one of the many benefits that can come out of transparency — another practice you should adopt). Pay particular attention in these cases since younger individuals tend to be prime candidates for a mentor/mentee relationship.

Build reliable systems and automate as much as possible.

Data management is something that every organization has to deal with, and chances are that your organization is bad at it. And when you’re bad at data management, odds are that your operations are not in the best of shape either. When you don’t have a good handle over your operations, administrative work can very quickly overtake your most valuable resource: time.

When dealing with an all-volunteer staff, excessive administrative work can become the death of progress. For us, having lacked the structural systems that kept the organization running meant that most of our officers had to spend the majority of their time keeping the organization afloat rather than moving us forward. This challenge became my mission to solve.

As I explained in my previous post, I was able to utilize several web-based tools to build an operational infrastructure that housed all of our data, automated many processes, and minimized the amount of administrative work that leadership had to deal with. This freed up my fellow officers to focus on more impactful work, which was now informed with useful and relevant data. Make sure that you have someone on your team whose sole responsibility is figuring out better ways to operate and make sure that this person is provided the support and resources to execute on their ideas.


There is plenty more that I could talk about, but I think I’ll end it here. I would encourage any VNPO leaders that are reading this to take a step back and consider how many of the issues mentioned at the top of this post are true for their organization. Then plan out a retreat to strategize tackling these issues, starting with developing a clear, unified vision and defining the shared values that the team should strive to uphold.

For additional resources, check out this reading list from the folks over at August.

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