5 ms·

I can't figure out how that relates to my point? We're operating under the assumption that people are donating something, which implies they worked, gained from

I can't figure out how that relates to my point? We're operating under the assumption that people are donating something, which implies they worked, gained from it, and then decided to pass on their gain to someone else. My point is about the efficiency of that donation, and the expectations we should have of the people who enable that donation.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
> We're operating under the assumption that people are donating something, which implies they worked, gained from it, and then decided to pass on their gain to someone else. Precisely. And they don't like the idea that some middle man is profiting off of what they're giving. It's really that simple. Tell me my money goes to some administrator who's organizing a bunch of volunteers to distribute donations and I'm wondering why the hell that guy isn't a volunteer.
- Klathmon 7y ago
  Because you can't democratize management and organization like you can with donation of individual goods and small amounts of money. You can donate $20 to a non-profit, but you can't donate "a few hours of CEO work" the same way, it just doesn't work. So it's more of an "all or nothing" kind of position. Expecting someone to donate $20 of their salary or a few days of their time? That's not a big deal. Expecting someone to donate 100% of their salary or 100% of their "work time" for a year or more? That's a HUGE ask. It's no surprise there aren't any takers.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    Then someone needs to take the time to explain to people what the value of that position is and why it requires the amount of money it is being paid, because neither are at all obvious.
  - vertex-four 7y ago
    I'm part of a volunteer organisation that does provide free food for all sorts of folk and does entirely run on volunteer labour - it's really not obvious that such an organisation does need a full-time CEO.
    - Klathmon 7y ago
      That's fair, I guess I shouldn't have used such absolute language, but I believe the point still stands. If for-profit organizations find it beneficial to grow and expand using dedicated administrative staff, the assumption is that there would be benefits to growing a non-profit organization to a similar level. And while I'm sure there are ways to make it work, if we want them to run as well as for-profit companies are run, it stands to reason that dedicated administrative staff would provide greater returns to the organization (and their cause) over the cost of employing them. If growing like that is an overall good thing is up for debate, but the idea that growing an organization requires dedicated and competent staff isn't really that shocking to me.
    - MadcapJake 7y ago
      I'm part of [INSERT ORG] that does [INSERT OPPOSITE OF GP'S STATEMENT]. So therefore, you are wrong. QED. > all sorts of folk Even if we did take your statement as a datapoint (hopefully one among many...), this clause could cover a small town or an entire continent. It's amazing that in a community of Y-Combinator founders, there is such a malformed understanding of what it means to run a large organization. Don't get me wrong, CEOs have inflated salaries. That is a society-wide problem, not just non-profits. To argue that non-profits should just forcibly change the bar for CEO salary (1) is the wrong place to enact this kind of social change, (2) would ensure that you only get the least qualifying candidates, (3) could lead CEOs into possibly devious action to increase personal wealth, and (4) could result in lower effort/efficiency as the CEO has to juggle other financial-fitness activities. If CEO salary is important to you, there is tons of data out there to help you pick a similar charity with more agreeable administrative compensation. I hope that there aren't people out there who just don't donate because of this.
      - yellowapple 7y ago
  - pfortuny 7y ago
    Mmmmh there are many retired ex-ceos who can perfectly volunteer for that work.
  - sdfsaf 7y ago
    " Because you can't democratize management and organization like you can with donation of individual goods and small amounts of money." Sure you can, by volunteering on the board of directors of said charity. Like my wife does, helping organize a charity large enough that it runs a free hospital, a dental clinic and home for otherwise homeless people in a major US city.
    - jlokier 7y ago
      That isn't what is meant by democratising management in the GP comment. In my own experience, the amount of work done by said trustees/directors of a larger charity is negligable compared to the amount of work done by manager-doers who are volunteering for them. By negligable, I'd like to quantify: Based on estimates relating to a charity I've been involved with, about 1:300 individual trustee hours to invidual working manager hours. With those kinds of ratios, the trustees/directors are not really doing the management. They are more like a consultation committee, who sign off on big things or take responsibility for major official decisions from time to time. What's meant by democratising management is getting rid of the working managers, and leaving all of that work to a democratic group - ie the trustees, or the volunteer labour force as a larger democracy. Non-profits vary greatly, so I wouldn't like to presume how much work your wife does, but in charities operating with numbers like I've just described, handing over the work done by the working managers to either the trustees (who have 1/300th the time available), or the volunteer labour force (who mean well but are not doing it professionally, and probably not full time), would usually result in the charity disastrously failing to deliver on its mission. (I have worked for a different non-profit, where time-consuming tensions between people who wanted things to be done more democratically (i.e. a lot more talking and reporting, and inappropriate privacy violations), and people actually putting in a lot of hours and barely keeping it running while providing enough deliverables to its sponsors, to retain critical things like a building to operate in, ultimately broke down, with neither the democracy-loving-but-doing-only-a-litte-work people happy, nor the sponsors, nor the people putting in hard volunteer work in the hope of its mission continuing, nor even the recipients of services (because it couldn't deliver the best under those circumstances). The service users were glad it existed, but they didn't know how much better it could have been. So, based on experience, I'm rather cautious about recommending democracy as an approach for new charitable social enterprises, if you need to deliver real, substantial services - it helps with some things, and causes tremendous, even surprising, problems with some others. I'd take more care structuring it, if doing it again.)
- datapunk 7y ago
  Do you believe that there are no resources needed for non profits? That donations made by person A magically get to person B who needs them? You are oblivious of the underlying business aspect that any nonprofit requires as they grow. Someone has the make running that business their job, and they do deserve to be paid for it. Non profits must disclose what they pay or compensate those people and its public information. You're more than capable of looking into any organization yourself before donating to them.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    Or, because my time is valuable to me, I'll just not donate to them at all, or donate something like food that no one is likely to line their pockets with. Why is it my responsibility as a donor to do all this research? > You are oblivious of the underlying business aspect that any nonprofit requires as they grow. I disagree with the idea that growing should be part of a charitable organizations goals. It is not a business and should not act like one.
    - mattferderer 7y ago
      Most charities have a mission. I use to have an attitude of critiquing how they use their money. Than I worked for a non-profit & another & another. Here's what I learned. I realized you can't critique how they spend their money from outside. The most important thing isn't how the money is used but the impact they have on their mission. If a CEO takes 98% of the money but the non-profit ends hunger, is that a problem? If you want talent, it costs money to keep & retain it. A lot of non-profits had amazing young people working there but those people wanted to have families & move up in the world. Non-profits that are 100% volunteer are usually less organized & less efficient. Most small non-profits that do pay employees pay very poorly & can't keep great employees which hurts efficiency of their mission. Sometimes really good opportunities come up for non-profits that could help their mission immensely but they have to turn them down because it would really look bad on their finances when people look at their administrative costs. There actually seem to be black markets out there of non-profits trying to move money around to achieve missions around without hurting their administrative cost to money spent directly on mission ratio. People need to quit handicapping non-profits. Solving problems cost money & non-profits often spend more time managing accounting than thinking about the problem they're trying to solve.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  Because if they can effectively organize people to efficiently distribute goods and do that on an on-going basis, that’s what enables the goods to get to those in need. Not many people are going to be able to volunteer full-time. At some scale, someone has to work full-time to make the machine go.
  - mtnGoat 7y ago
    but does that person need to be a CEO? or could most of the day to day be managed by someone at a much lower rate. and then use the board/ceo to make directional and larger decisions. high level decision making is not needed all day every day at most companies. Even the ones i've worked at that had thousands of employees, could operate with out a head being around 9-5. Particularly so if they were well managed.
- OrwellianChild 7y ago
  Sometimes, paying for things yields better outcomes and more economically efficient results than seeking those outcomes thru volunteerism alone.
- jlokier 7y ago
  I've been a non-profit "administrator" guy - and I did volunteer. Guess what happened? It was a nightmare. Work times varied between 40 and 80 hours a week (I'm not exaggerating, there were day shifts and evening shifts and I often covered both). If someone else was off sick or on holiday, I often had to cover for them. There were zero weeks off, because we were running all through the year. Less involved people had nice things like holidays. But not muggins administrator here. Just like a startup, in smaller non-profits you have to wear a lot of hats. There aren't enough people to specialise in all the things that need doing. Even when there are plenty of people, most of them won't put in enough hours, and the quality of those hours is, how shall we say, "variable". It's a thing that comes up in volunteer organisations in particular. Volunteers tend to think they're being generous when they put in, say, a 5 hour shift. And they are being generous. But unfortunately, because of the needs served by the organisation, a comfortable donation of time is often small compared with what's needed. Variable-time volunteers like to spend much of their time goofing off as well. Like it's sort of a job, and sort of a fun day out. To rub it in, they tend to think the work done by someone else doesn't really need doing, or is done much slower than they would do themselves. Even though they have no idea what's really involved, and their eyes glaze over if you try to describe it all, and they don't believe you anyway. If you've worked in a software dev shop, you may recognise the type: A project that took 1000 person-hours to produce will be assessed by someone as "a couple of hours". Sometimes they're right, usually not. So they "suggest" how to do it better, often in public forums, except you can't figure out any way to usefully apply their suggestion that doesn't create more work in the end, or infringe someone's data privacy, or fail to deliver what some sponsor expects for their money, or fails a legal requirement, or it's just plain nonsense, or etc. (longer rant available on request). People talk a lot of shit. But you acknowledge you don't know everything, so you delegate to them a task, hoping they will build up responsibilities over time, without failing in your responsibilities in the process. (For example you can't just hand over a bunch of people's personal data, or a box of cash, or the keys to dangerous machine, to a keen volunteer-for-the-day just because they want to help.) So you give them a useful but quite easy task, and they do a half-assed job of even that, and quit half way anyway ("I have to go home now, sorry man, I gotta leave the rest to you to finish off"). Then you're stuck staying late while the other volunteers have gone home, or have gone to the pub for a drink because they had enough fun contributing for the day. Then people wonder why they don't see you at the social events, and think you're not really engaged with the organisation. Little do they know, and it doesn't register if you tell them anyway, that the reason you're not at the pub is because you're doing the damn record-keeping and box-moving and tool-operating that they're dimly aware exists, but somehow forget that it adds up. The end result: Being a volunteer administrator at that scale and level of responsibility is very expensive for the poor fool who makes the initial commitment! I went from good, comfortable savings, to struggling to pay houshold bills, because it wasn't possible to do enough paid work at the same time. It costs a lot of money to be a volunteer. Naturally, some would "suggest" that paid work should take priority. But they didn't actually help make that possible; instead, the same people tended to add to the workload, by adding meetings instead of useful assistance. A few people offered assistance and were genuinely, awesomely, helpful. (Massive thank you - you probably know who you are.) A few others, though, offered "assistance" which was of negative help (i.e. created more net work), and seemed to be all about improving their social status instead (democratic organisations can suffer from this). It's not actually possible to walk away from a high-responsibility volunteer position, while being responsible about it, since doing so risks seriously jeopardising the work of the organisation.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

> We're operating under the assumption that people are donating something, which implies they worked, gained from it, and then decided to pass on their gain to someone else. Precisely. And they don't like the idea that some middle man is profiting off of what they're giving. It's really that simple. Tell me my money goes to some administrator who's organizing a bunch of volunteers to distribute donations and I'm wondering why the hell that guy isn't a volunteer.

Klathmon 7y ago
Because you can't democratize management and organization like you can with donation of individual goods and small amounts of money. You can donate $20 to a non-profit, but you can't donate "a few hours of CEO work" the same way, it just doesn't work. So it's more of an "all or nothing" kind of position. Expecting someone to donate $20 of their salary or a few days of their time? That's not a big deal. Expecting someone to donate 100% of their salary or 100% of their "work time" for a year or more? That's a HUGE ask. It's no surprise there aren't any takers.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  Then someone needs to take the time to explain to people what the value of that position is and why it requires the amount of money it is being paid, because neither are at all obvious.
- vertex-four 7y ago
  I'm part of a volunteer organisation that does provide free food for all sorts of folk and does entirely run on volunteer labour - it's really not obvious that such an organisation does need a full-time CEO.
  - Klathmon 7y ago
    That's fair, I guess I shouldn't have used such absolute language, but I believe the point still stands. If for-profit organizations find it beneficial to grow and expand using dedicated administrative staff, the assumption is that there would be benefits to growing a non-profit organization to a similar level. And while I'm sure there are ways to make it work, if we want them to run as well as for-profit companies are run, it stands to reason that dedicated administrative staff would provide greater returns to the organization (and their cause) over the cost of employing them. If growing like that is an overall good thing is up for debate, but the idea that growing an organization requires dedicated and competent staff isn't really that shocking to me.
  - MadcapJake 7y ago
    I'm part of [INSERT ORG] that does [INSERT OPPOSITE OF GP'S STATEMENT]. So therefore, you are wrong. QED. > all sorts of folk Even if we did take your statement as a datapoint (hopefully one among many...), this clause could cover a small town or an entire continent. It's amazing that in a community of Y-Combinator founders, there is such a malformed understanding of what it means to run a large organization. Don't get me wrong, CEOs have inflated salaries. That is a society-wide problem, not just non-profits. To argue that non-profits should just forcibly change the bar for CEO salary (1) is the wrong place to enact this kind of social change, (2) would ensure that you only get the least qualifying candidates, (3) could lead CEOs into possibly devious action to increase personal wealth, and (4) could result in lower effort/efficiency as the CEO has to juggle other financial-fitness activities. If CEO salary is important to you, there is tons of data out there to help you pick a similar charity with more agreeable administrative compensation. I hope that there aren't people out there who just don't donate because of this.
    - yellowapple 7y ago
- pfortuny 7y ago
  Mmmmh there are many retired ex-ceos who can perfectly volunteer for that work.
- sdfsaf 7y ago
  " Because you can't democratize management and organization like you can with donation of individual goods and small amounts of money." Sure you can, by volunteering on the board of directors of said charity. Like my wife does, helping organize a charity large enough that it runs a free hospital, a dental clinic and home for otherwise homeless people in a major US city.
  - jlokier 7y ago
    That isn't what is meant by democratising management in the GP comment. In my own experience, the amount of work done by said trustees/directors of a larger charity is negligable compared to the amount of work done by manager-doers who are volunteering for them. By negligable, I'd like to quantify: Based on estimates relating to a charity I've been involved with, about 1:300 individual trustee hours to invidual working manager hours. With those kinds of ratios, the trustees/directors are not really doing the management. They are more like a consultation committee, who sign off on big things or take responsibility for major official decisions from time to time. What's meant by democratising management is getting rid of the working managers, and leaving all of that work to a democratic group - ie the trustees, or the volunteer labour force as a larger democracy. Non-profits vary greatly, so I wouldn't like to presume how much work your wife does, but in charities operating with numbers like I've just described, handing over the work done by the working managers to either the trustees (who have 1/300th the time available), or the volunteer labour force (who mean well but are not doing it professionally, and probably not full time), would usually result in the charity disastrously failing to deliver on its mission. (I have worked for a different non-profit, where time-consuming tensions between people who wanted things to be done more democratically (i.e. a lot more talking and reporting, and inappropriate privacy violations), and people actually putting in a lot of hours and barely keeping it running while providing enough deliverables to its sponsors, to retain critical things like a building to operate in, ultimately broke down, with neither the democracy-loving-but-doing-only-a-litte-work people happy, nor the sponsors, nor the people putting in hard volunteer work in the hope of its mission continuing, nor even the recipients of services (because it couldn't deliver the best under those circumstances). The service users were glad it existed, but they didn't know how much better it could have been. So, based on experience, I'm rather cautious about recommending democracy as an approach for new charitable social enterprises, if you need to deliver real, substantial services - it helps with some things, and causes tremendous, even surprising, problems with some others. I'd take more care structuring it, if doing it again.)
datapunk 7y ago
Do you believe that there are no resources needed for non profits? That donations made by person A magically get to person B who needs them? You are oblivious of the underlying business aspect that any nonprofit requires as they grow. Someone has the make running that business their job, and they do deserve to be paid for it. Non profits must disclose what they pay or compensate those people and its public information. You're more than capable of looking into any organization yourself before donating to them.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  Or, because my time is valuable to me, I'll just not donate to them at all, or donate something like food that no one is likely to line their pockets with. Why is it my responsibility as a donor to do all this research? > You are oblivious of the underlying business aspect that any nonprofit requires as they grow. I disagree with the idea that growing should be part of a charitable organizations goals. It is not a business and should not act like one.
  - mattferderer 7y ago
    Most charities have a mission. I use to have an attitude of critiquing how they use their money. Than I worked for a non-profit & another & another. Here's what I learned. I realized you can't critique how they spend their money from outside. The most important thing isn't how the money is used but the impact they have on their mission. If a CEO takes 98% of the money but the non-profit ends hunger, is that a problem? If you want talent, it costs money to keep & retain it. A lot of non-profits had amazing young people working there but those people wanted to have families & move up in the world. Non-profits that are 100% volunteer are usually less organized & less efficient. Most small non-profits that do pay employees pay very poorly & can't keep great employees which hurts efficiency of their mission. Sometimes really good opportunities come up for non-profits that could help their mission immensely but they have to turn them down because it would really look bad on their finances when people look at their administrative costs. There actually seem to be black markets out there of non-profits trying to move money around to achieve missions around without hurting their administrative cost to money spent directly on mission ratio. People need to quit handicapping non-profits. Solving problems cost money & non-profits often spend more time managing accounting than thinking about the problem they're trying to solve.
sokoloff 7y ago
Because if they can effectively organize people to efficiently distribute goods and do that on an on-going basis, that’s what enables the goods to get to those in need. Not many people are going to be able to volunteer full-time. At some scale, someone has to work full-time to make the machine go.
- mtnGoat 7y ago
  but does that person need to be a CEO? or could most of the day to day be managed by someone at a much lower rate. and then use the board/ceo to make directional and larger decisions. high level decision making is not needed all day every day at most companies. Even the ones i've worked at that had thousands of employees, could operate with out a head being around 9-5. Particularly so if they were well managed.
OrwellianChild 7y ago
Sometimes, paying for things yields better outcomes and more economically efficient results than seeking those outcomes thru volunteerism alone.
jlokier 7y ago
I've been a non-profit "administrator" guy - and I did volunteer. Guess what happened? It was a nightmare. Work times varied between 40 and 80 hours a week (I'm not exaggerating, there were day shifts and evening shifts and I often covered both). If someone else was off sick or on holiday, I often had to cover for them. There were zero weeks off, because we were running all through the year. Less involved people had nice things like holidays. But not muggins administrator here. Just like a startup, in smaller non-profits you have to wear a lot of hats. There aren't enough people to specialise in all the things that need doing. Even when there are plenty of people, most of them won't put in enough hours, and the quality of those hours is, how shall we say, "variable". It's a thing that comes up in volunteer organisations in particular. Volunteers tend to think they're being generous when they put in, say, a 5 hour shift. And they are being generous. But unfortunately, because of the needs served by the organisation, a comfortable donation of time is often small compared with what's needed. Variable-time volunteers like to spend much of their time goofing off as well. Like it's sort of a job, and sort of a fun day out. To rub it in, they tend to think the work done by someone else doesn't really need doing, or is done much slower than they would do themselves. Even though they have no idea what's really involved, and their eyes glaze over if you try to describe it all, and they don't believe you anyway. If you've worked in a software dev shop, you may recognise the type: A project that took 1000 person-hours to produce will be assessed by someone as "a couple of hours". Sometimes they're right, usually not. So they "suggest" how to do it better, often in public forums, except you can't figure out any way to usefully apply their suggestion that doesn't create more work in the end, or infringe someone's data privacy, or fail to deliver what some sponsor expects for their money, or fails a legal requirement, or it's just plain nonsense, or etc. (longer rant available on request). People talk a lot of shit. But you acknowledge you don't know everything, so you delegate to them a task, hoping they will build up responsibilities over time, without failing in your responsibilities in the process. (For example you can't just hand over a bunch of people's personal data, or a box of cash, or the keys to dangerous machine, to a keen volunteer-for-the-day just because they want to help.) So you give them a useful but quite easy task, and they do a half-assed job of even that, and quit half way anyway ("I have to go home now, sorry man, I gotta leave the rest to you to finish off"). Then you're stuck staying late while the other volunteers have gone home, or have gone to the pub for a drink because they had enough fun contributing for the day. Then people wonder why they don't see you at the social events, and think you're not really engaged with the organisation. Little do they know, and it doesn't register if you tell them anyway, that the reason you're not at the pub is because you're doing the damn record-keeping and box-moving and tool-operating that they're dimly aware exists, but somehow forget that it adds up. The end result: Being a volunteer administrator at that scale and level of responsibility is very expensive for the poor fool who makes the initial commitment! I went from good, comfortable savings, to struggling to pay houshold bills, because it wasn't possible to do enough paid work at the same time. It costs a lot of money to be a volunteer. Naturally, some would "suggest" that paid work should take priority. But they didn't actually help make that possible; instead, the same people tended to add to the workload, by adding meetings instead of useful assistance. A few people offered assistance and were genuinely, awesomely, helpful. (Massive thank you - you probably know who you are.) A few others, though, offered "assistance" which was of negative help (i.e. created more net work), and seemed to be all about improving their social status instead (democratic organisations can suffer from this). It's not actually possible to walk away from a high-responsibility volunteer position, while being responsible about it, since doing so risks seriously jeopardising the work of the organisation.