Staff Vision
Our vision for the Staff of The Augustan Society, Inc.:
At present, non-professional staff in the form of Consuls 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. Non-HQ tasks should be transferred to volunteers to the extent possible.
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 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 who would focus on the clerical and mechanical aspects of the work, leaving the Board and their appointees to carry the balance of the work. This too is beyond our present ability to fund, but is something we might achieve with only a doubling of the membership.
In both cases, they will be expected to oversee the work of volunteers, both on- and off-site. 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.
Thus I think an appropriate immediate goal would be to find volunteers to take on all tasks that do not have to be performed at Headquarters, and that documentation of all HQ tasks be completed to the point where a competent clerk without a background in the Society or our special topics would be able to assume those responsibilities. Consuls are working toward both of these as time and resources permit, but the President must find and appoint most of those willing volunteers.
