On 3/5/07, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
I certainly agree that managing 12 volunteers doing a few hours a week would be more difficult than 2 employees, but as a not-for-profit charity there's no harm in exploring the feasability of relying on volunteers.
You mention communication. Volunteers given these positions would be aware that they're doing an important job: they should feel obligated to working a particular number hours of week and should also feel obligated to inform the Foundation when they are unable to fulfil this. The Foundation could contact them over the phone or by e-mail: I can't see it being hard to contact volunteers.
With communication, I was particularly referring to communication between volunteers when they share a task. Let's say there's some sort of work that could be estimated to take 10 man hours. If you have 5 volunteers doing that, the loss of productivity due to the necessity to communicate between them is immense unless the task is ridiculously mundane. These aren't theoretical guess either, there's tons of literature out there that show projects that failed due to the complexity of communication involved.
Regards,
Sebastian
P.S. Of course, you can always argue that something "shouldn't" be this way or that people "should" behave in a certain manner, that alone won't make it happen though, especially with volunteers. The relationship between a volunteer and his superior is rather different from that of an employee and his superior. In the former, motivation to perform can change much more subtly and requires additional efforts which, in the case of the foundation, isn't feasible since its precisely the lack of staff that caused this discussion.