Staff Vision
At present, volunteer staff in the form of Bruce and Marta Metcalf are obliged to perform all work that must or should be done at Headquarters, and entirely too much that doesn't depend on that location. This office will be discontinued on 31 December 2017, after which the work will fall to Headquarters Staff. Barring a move to a public Headquarters, this will not involve any immediate change in personnel.
There are two approaches to long-term staffing:
The first is to hire an Executive Director with substantial skills (especially at Fundraising and Membership Development), who would take over much of the responsibilities now assigned to the Board. While a common approach for larger organizations, this would not likely be affordable for our Society until and unless we increase our membership by several orders of magnitude.
The second is to hire an Office Manager, perhaps part-time, who would focus on the clerical and mechanical aspects of the work, leaving the Board and volunteers to carry the bulk of the work. This too is also likely beyond our present ability to fund, but is something we might achieve with only a doubling of the membership.
In both cases, the Board will need to oversee the work of the Headquarters Staff, and a senior volunteer will need to oversee the work of other volunteers, both on- and off-site, possibly in the form of a Volunteer Coordinator. Finding a candidate who can do so constructively will be essential, and close monitoring during their first years will be needed to ensure we have chosen well.
Proposal: The Society should document all of the tasks and procedures employed to the degree that a reasonably competent person might be able to follow such procedures to good effect, notwithstanding that some tasks may require specialized knowledge or skills.
The above is the primary aim of this Wiki, but few are participating, resulting in slow progress.
The challenge of our limited Headquarters Staff is exacerbated by asking them to do things that do not benefit from being done at Headquarters. While mail and back issue sales (to pick just two examples) do so benefit, many activites now performed there do not. The best way to increase efficiency at Headquarters, therefore, is to transfer as many non-local activities as possible to off-site volunteers.
Proposal: The Society should transfer all responsibilities presently performed at Headquarters that do not benefit from being done there to off-site volunteers.
