Are you wasting $20,000 a year in volunteer work effort? How about $78,000 a year? Is it possible your organization is wasting volunteer work efforts without realizing it?
In order to understand why we need to manage volunteer work more effectively we need to put the value of that work into perspective. Once that value is determined it should give you insight into the need to reduce volunteer worker burnout.
It may seem difficult to measure the value of volunteer workers, but it can be quite simple, actually. Here’s how- think as if you were paying them a salary and then add some nominal burden and overhead, multiplied by the number of hours they work and that is your dollar amount. I ask you to use dollar amounts and salaries because those are universal concepts – everyone understands them (or should).
Some examples are:
- Non-Profit County Business Education Board -
- 10 members
- All business Executives
- Avg. salary $75,000
- Hourly rate equates to $36
- Multiply by time spent
- In meetings – 1.5 hours/month
- On phone calls – 1 hour/month
- Traveling – 1 hour/month
- Miscellaneous research, writing, etc. – 1 hour
- Your bare cost would be $1,620/month or nearly $20,000 per year!
- Look at churches and religious organizations:
- For perspective let’s look at a church that has 300 members or 500 regular attendees (because all attendees are not necessarily members)
- We will use the 80/20 rule here – 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people
- Of the 500 attendees then 80% of the work is done by 100 people.
- If all 100 people volunteer
- 1.5 hours per week on average (some will be more, some not so much)
- They only earned $10 an hour
- That is $1,500 a week or $78,000 a year!
- Here’s a key factor though – several times a year volunteer based organizations put on events that require supreme effort for a relatively short amount of time abut that time is stacked on top of other voluntary time.
- So for good measure throw in a Harvest Festival and all of a sudden you have 100 people volunteering to do setup, stage craft, arts, juggling, planning, passing out flyers door to door, cooking, drama, music, etc.
- Now for such a simple affair as a Harvest Festival you might get 100 people donating 8 hours minimum and now, at $10 an hour, yo have $8,000.
- I am willing to bet that 50% or more are worth, for if you were to go hire their services to fulfill their roles at the Harvest Fair, you would pay twice that.
So now all you have to do is relate your organizations volunteer base to the two examples above and shortly you would see why you need to pay attention and reduce or eliminate burnout. If this hasn’t convinced you to think about and learn more on the subject, stay tuned for our next posts on the matter, or call me!
Next time – Avoiding Burnout in Volunteer Work – Pt. 2 -Three Things You Should Do
If you know an organization that needs help with reducing volunteer burnout, we should talk. Please call me, Bart Gragg, at 925.757.7473
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