During the first year of Covid, I was at home with my kids, who were aged 7 and 4 at the time. The days were long, and they constantly needed to be entertained. At one point, they discovered the vacuum and were fascinated by it. So when they weren’t looking I would intentionally drop cracker crumbs and assorted other debris on the floor. “Oh noOOooo, kids! Looks like this spot could use some vacuuming! Thank you for helping Daddy clean it up!”
Now, they could have been helpful if they had just put away their Legos like I had asked them to so, but no, they wanted to use the vacuum, while the Legos remained there for me to step on throughout the day and in the middle of the night.
This makes me think about one of the fundamental problems in our sector. Managing other people and their need to feel useful, productive, and engaged. I think a fourth or a third of nonprofit work is just making up tasks for other people and in the process ignoring ones that would be genuinely helpful. Think about it:
Boards of directors can be very useful when they’re focused on the right things. But so much of EDs’ and staff’s work is just keeping them engaged by having various things for them to be involved in. So staff start creating board packages for them to read (or more likely ignore), committees for them to feel some sense of structure, and various tasks that staff could probably do a lot more efficiently.
Donors and potential donors also need to be “engaged,” so various events and activities are set up, such as meetings and site visits. Some of them want to contribute in unique ways, or fund specific things, so nonprofits end up spending time and sometimes resources trying to making up stuff for them to do. Some of it may be useful, but a lot of it is ego-driven nonsense.
Volunteers: I remember a time when we just needed volunteers to come in and sweep up the place, file stuff, stack chairs, toss out moldy old leftover event foods we had saved up and then completely forgot about. But some of the potential volunteers were “skilled” and needed more advanced work. One of them created a complex marketing plan that we never used, simply because we wanted to keep her engaged.
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