Lessons from a Volunteer-Run Library of Things

We read a lot about volunteer engagement and leadership from the perspective of agencies who have paid Volunteer Managers – those who oversee, manage and coordinate the efforts of the volunteer team who are committed to support the work of their agency. In those conversations, it’s often easy to forget that the vast amount of volunteer leadership occurs in ‘all volunteer’-led organisations, where there is no paid staff member to take control and where the challenges can sometime be different from having a single person designated to that leadership role.

In this article, I share my own experiences co-creating one such ‘all volunteer’-led agency. I hope that my personal learnings might help other Leaders of Volunteers (paid and unpaid) in the work that they do.

Libraries of Things

Libraries of Things (LoTs) are incredibly powerful vehicles for multi-factored change. They enable people to borrow useful items for a very low cost instead of buying them, like tools, toys and appliances. These unique libraries can: change people’s consumption habits; change their way of thinking about consumption; change expectations around the right to repair goods; encourage people to question our society’s throw-away mentality; enable people to try new hobbies and learn new skills without investing a lot up front; save members money and often introduce them to others who care about the future of the world; and even ferment political will to advocate for new laws.

For all the immense positives that Libraries of Things foster in a community, they are also incredibly time-consuming to run and incredibly complex to set up and keep running. As the co-founder of Share Shed, Inc., Queensland’s first Library of Things, I often joke that the four-and-a-half years I spent setting up and then leading the library was the equivalent of an applied Ph.D. in not-for-profit organisation and volunteer management.

By starting Share Shed, I found a community of excellent, like-minded people who were just as passionate about creating practical change as I was - and still am. I really hope the following lessons help all those passionate about creating a better society stand on our shoulders.

Six Lessons Learned 

Lesson 1: The people are the organisation, and the organisation is the people.

When everyone is showing up to work for free, your organisation’s culture is what binds people to the cause. The mission attracts them, but the culture is what keeps them there in lieu of payment.

Who are your people?

Your people are your volunteers. Your people are your members. Your people are your followers on social media. Your people are your supporters and donors.

Note that I say ‘your volunteers,’ not ‘the volunteers.’ Language matters.

My unofficial motto for any kind of teamwork or engagement work is “culture eats strategy for breakfast” – an observation often attributed to business management expert Peter Drucker.

Of all the things that happened at Share Shed, I am most proud that so many people I spoke to from all parts of our tribe said that the culture at Share Shed “just feels good to me.” That so many people felt that way says we got a few fundamentals right.

What are those fundamentals?

• Do we value improvement and learning?
• Do we try new things?
• Do we take the time to celebrate our organisation and our people?
• Do we have fun?
• Do we work hard and support each other to do what is right for them?
• Can we disagree without it becoming personal?
• Do we reciprocate and connect with others beyond our organisation?

How you do things affects everything; to quote the classic Australian movie The Castle, it creates ‘the vibe.’ The vibe of your organisation is your most crucial asset. Intangible as it may be, anyone who has been in a toxic environment will tell you they could feel how tense people were just by walking around the office.

We didn’t get it all perfect all the time, but as a team we were committed to doing our best. Deciding if you have a healthy culture comes down to this: Are you fear-based or growth-based? Do you lean into challenges or do you avoid them?

Another piece of wisdom I lean on when shaping culture is former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower’s belief that “leadership is the art of inspiring people to want to do what you want them to do.” Everything else is just management.

Culture is created and reinforced by the leaders of the organisation. No ifs, no buts.

Encouraging, building and supporting the team is the fundamental work of a leader. It also means being very clear about what kind of behaviour and attitudes you will not accept and stopping those from taking root before they negatively affect the team. Nothing drives volunteers away faster than an unfriendly and unsupportive culture. They will find better things to do.

Culture work becomes your brand. Your brand is what your organisation is known for, what people feel when they picture your organisation in their mind. A logo is just the shiny piece of design that symbolises the feeling you want associated with your organisation. You can’t influence how people feel about the logo unless you are in control of your culture.

Lesson 2: Get the right people into the crucial leadership jobs as soon as you can.

I am first in line to admit we did not do this well at the start. We were so keen to open the doors and ‘fail forwards’ that we kind of glossed over the value of experienced people to guide us once we had enough people on the committee. My co-founder Sarah had a much better understanding of what expertise we required, but felt unable to advocate for it without criticising the people who had already volunteered to do the work.

For volunteer-run organisations, avoiding ‘warm body recruiting’ (the term for accepting anyone with a pulse for a critical role — thank you, Michelle Stafford!) is a lesson to learn quickly. Whether a mismatch of experience will affect you sooner or later depends on how crucial the role is to fulfilling the organisation’s mission, but be assured that it will affect you at some point.

In Share Shed’s case, some roles outgrew people’s abilities faster than they had time to upskill. For example, after two years of operation, the job of Treasurer became much more complicated than our volunteer had experience for, so we eventually found someone in the financial sector to fill it. Happily, the original Treasurer stayed on in a non-management volunteer role that suited her bubbly personality.

We were a small, incorporated association that had a management committee of five. It was our version of a board, but with more operational direction than a proper Board of Directors. When our committee was operating well, the organisation thrived and I felt much more at ease and able to rest in the ability of others to get things done without assistance. When we had limited experience, the opposite was true. I felt frazzled and often acted in up to six distinct roles at any one time. Yes, six. I counted.

I encourage all organisations, no matter their size, to invest time in recruiting people with a demonstrated ability to think strategically to their leadership teams. There is nothing else I can think of that gives a better return on investment!

There is a time and place for people to ‘have a go' and learn, but make sure those that are learning make up the minority of your leadership team, not the majority. The sooner you can attract a critical mass of people who have relevant prior experience to draw on, the better off you will be and the less mess you will have to sort out later. Hard, but possible!

Which leads neatly to Lesson 3.

Lesson 3: Limit terms in demanding roles to save volunteers from burnout, while encouraging shared responsibility and growth.

Burnout is a chronic condition that compounds over time. Taking personal responsibility for what you can and cannot commit to in life is a huge part of preventing burnout for yourself. But the hard truth for volunteer-run organisations is that a lot of the time if the work doesn’t get done, there is no-one else to do it! This can lead to overwork and a burnout problem down the track. Volunteer-run organisations can feel akin to working at a tech start-up at times, with people working crazy hours for free with passion, but with no million dollar pay-day on the horizon to eventually compensate the work.

So how do you avoid burned-out volunteers? These are my suggestions:

1. Create organisation “buffers” by creating role boundaries and great support structures.

Your culture plays a big part here, too! Don’t create a policy and then ignore it. You need to live the policy and embed it into the way of doing things to have any real effect.

An example of a role boundary could be: any role that requires 15 hours a week or more can only be filled by the same person for a maximum of two consecutive years. Of course, the idea is not to push people out, so it’s important to encourage those who have ‘maxed out’ to volunteer in other ways if they are still keen. But they need to take a break! With a set timeframe, it automatically gives rise to the need to plan for hand-overs.

I tried this, but we didn’t have the structure to handle me stepping out of the position. As the last remaining founder, I also struggled to see the organisation struggle, so ended up stepping in far more than was healthy.

2. Add a recruitment role to the team of essential staff at the beginning.

The person in this role should be a born networker who is confidently able to seek out and tap people for roles that are coming up in 6-to-12 months’ time. Have potential recruits come and sit in on your leadership team meetings and visit the organisation during operational hours. Make sure they are a good fit for your team as well. Actively ask everyone in your entire team if they know someone outside the organisation who may be a good fit.

3. Plan your personal exit at the start, or at least commit to review your exit plan in two years.

It may be that you plan to change roles if you are still enjoying volunteering or shift up or down a gear when it comes to time and commitment.

4. Have upfront conversations about sustainable and realistic workloads at meetings.

Work to understand the real capacity of your volunteers, not what they say they can do. If someone is consistently inconsistent, they will create work for others who need to pick up the slack. Remember: Under promise and over deliver – never the other way around!

5. Be aware that excellent volunteers never say no; they find a way to make it happen.

Unfortunately, our capitalist society is constantly sending us messages about the virtues of doing more and being better. No wonder so many of us in the volunteer space derive a good chunk of our self-worth from our capacity to go above and beyond for others. Been there, still recovering!

I am not pooh-poohing people who do this, but I now treat the behaviour of going above and beyond the call of duty with the same judiciousness as I approach eating ice cream. It’s ok occasionally, but it should not be what sustains your organisation.

Keep an eye on why your volunteers go above and beyond. Did they put in more effort than required because they wanted to (say, writing an exceptional newsletter that took four hours but was a work of art) or did they have to work much harder than anticipated to fulfill a standard expectation due to lack of available resources and support? The first example fills people with pride, the second can lead to resentment if the underlying problem is not remedied.

Extraordinary effort, of either type, needs to be acknowledged and appreciated, but don’t let that type of effort become an expectation. Say no, gently, to the person who always takes on too much (in hindsight, I wish I had a sign that said ‘No Martyrs’ above my desk!).

Encourage those prone to self-flagellation through excessive work to teach others what they do in their role so they can job share and make a smooth transition out when the time comes. Otherwise, you may find a gaping hole in your organisation’s capacity when they do eventually leave.

Lesson 4:  Paid staff are a pipe-dream. Invest in creating great systems instead.

For a volunteer-run organisation, the dream of having a paid staff member is a Christ-like vision hovering in the distance. Oh, the dream of having a paid staff member! How many times I thought this would eventually solve our problems!

Transforming from all-volunteer to paid staff is likely a lot further away than you imagine. It’s not impossible, but it requires a lot of planning to scale to the point where an employee is a sustainable option.

My advice is that if you want to be able to take on a paid staff member eventually, first get really good at systems and workflows and find internal communication strategies that work. Systems that work well free up time and energy for developing a realistic pathway to employing someone.

Share Shed never made it to having a paid staff member, but we did have a good go at improving our systems and processes with that goal in mind – while fighting to stay alive during the pandemic.

Systems that worked well at Share Shed:

• As the Shed Manager, I used to do short voice memos once or twice a week in a WhatsApp group that was just for updates, nothing else. By far the most productive way to keep the majority of volunteers informed;  
• We had an easy-to-use self-rostering system for librarians. While I absolutely love good Volunteer Management software, sometimes the best software solution is the one that is easily understood by the majority very quickly (we used TeamUp, if you are wondering. Free, easy to edit, has a phone app and online access);
• New volunteer induction handbook and checklist;
• Having lead librarians write the librarian handbook; and
• Shed open days in January to attract new volunteers

Any LoT that is lucky enough to be run by a local council will start with a huge advantage as everyone is paid to work on the project from the beginning and the space is rent-free.

Lesson 5: Spend a decent proportion of your organisation’s income on well-thought-out advertising and public relations.

Targeted, considered marketing is absolutely critical to success.

In the beginning, our team had ideas about how to reach people going everywhere, and we tried quite a few unsuccessfully. When asked, everyone has an opinion on how to reach more people.

Can I please press upon you that marketing is not the area to just try anything because it might work? The hard truth is not everyone has good ideas that will deliver results and as a volunteer-run organisation, you do not have the capacity to keep trying random ideas and hoping for the best. You need your efforts to count and to build on each other to bring in dollars and people.

If you don’t have someone on your team with a bonafide marketing strategy background, then undertake some research and find someone who is willing to teach you and help develop a plan your team can feasibly implement.

Ask them if they know how to design a multi-layered campaign (using a mix of communication channels to broadcast the same message) that focuses on your target audience. What do they see as your unique angle to get attention? Then listen, learn, implement and monitor results.

Let me give you a real-life example of a mediocre approach to marketing from Share Shed. We had many supporters and volunteers saying we should do a leaflet drop in the local area to increase membership and that they would do the leaflet dropping if we printed the flyers.

Friends, it didn’t happen. Brisbane is stupidly humid, which deters people from walking very far for very long. Leaflet drops are more complicated to organise than they appear. We needed a plan to saturate key neighbourhoods over time, not just have a few helpers put flyers in the post boxes around the streets where they lived when they felt like it.

Plan to maximise the time and resources you have in one or two great marketing efforts that build on your key message rather than lots of unfocused or poorly executed attempts at attracting attention.  

In short, better a very good sardine than a not very good lobster!

Here are some cheap marketing ideas that did work and didn’t cost a lot:

• Fridge magnets! A great visual reminder to keep members coming back to use their membership again and again.
• Have your friendliest and chattiest volunteers call members who are expiring. Do this on a week night, after dinner, once a month. We found this method much more effective than emails for retention and it allowed for feedback on why people don’t want to renew their membership. We were able to obtain lots of detailed feedback (which was recorded in a spreadsheet) almost all of it positive.
• Support other people’s events - give as well as receive. We attended the Chrome St.  fiesta community arts festival and local school fetes with a stall and games.
• Cultivate social media champions amongst your supporters to spread your content in their own Facebook or WhatsApp groups.
• Find a press release template and use it, use it, use it. We were on TV and radio about once a quarter on average as a result of approaching media outlets with story ideas.

Here are some marketing attempts that didn’t work:

• Being inconsistent with our marketing. Often we did it in fits and bursts and it wasn’t connected very well.
• Not spending enough; we didn’t spend much beyond printing costs in the budget.
• Not having enough signage on the street. For a physical place, we needed more flags and permanent signs. Again, investing in these would have been a good move early on, but we were worried about saving money for costs that didn’t eventuate.

And finally, four big marketing takeaways:

1. Reputation and reach grows over time. Build on it consistently.
2. Adapt. Don’t keep doing the same old thing (leaflet drops) because that’s all you know how to do. But be judicious - don’t change focus just because there is a shiny new thing, like TikTok. If your target market is young people, then yes be on TikTok not Facebook. If your demographic is working mums, find out who they listen to - then go talk to them about your organisation.
3. Learn what your most effective key words are and invest in your Search Engine Optimisation early.
4. Marketing helps in good times but it’s especially critical in bad times. This takeaway became more and more important at Share Shed as we struggled to stay afloat. Had we focused on our marketing with calculated intent from the start, I wager we would have had an increased chance of surviving when times got tough.

Lesson 6: It’s OK to close.

A volunteer-run Library of Things is a lot of work to sustain. It requires the input of vast amounts of energy and skill from individuals who have lives outside the organisation. While our team had good times aplenty, the nature of the underfunded, not-for-profit realm meant those individuals also needed to rally again and again  when difficulties and obstacles arose.

In our case, the challenges of staying open during the global pandemic created a perfect storm of compounding difficulties that overwhelmed our dwindling capacity to cope. Eventually the time came for us to face up to reality. To keep going was only going to hurt an already exhausted team. Unfortunately, we would not get a chance to gracefully hand over leadership of Share Shed to a paid manager, which was our ultimate goal.

On March 8, 2021, faced with insurmountable odds on many fronts, our management committee unanimously decided that we would close down rather than continue to look for one more lifeline. We were exhausted from the sheer effort of staying afloat in 2020 and, by March 2021, we couldn’t go any further.

Recall the key take-away from Lesson 1, how important culture is to an organization? It wasn’t until the very last day of Share Shed operation that I found out exactly what our intangible culture was in words. As a thank you from my team, I was presented with a beautiful illustration that had the words ‘Building community through sharing’ as a banner on the top. Perfect.

Key Takeaways, Lasting Legacy and Conclusion

Almost one year on, I feel I have finally had enough time to decompress and begin piecing together everything we did well and what we would have done differently for the benefit of others. Consequently, writing out these lessons has also revealed to me the real beauty of our unique organisation.

When I look back at our decision, I sometimes have ideas about what we could have done differently, but honestly, it is a moot point. We made the best decision we could after a lot of investigation into alternatives, and we made the best decision for the people in the organisation at the time. No organisation, volunteer-run or not, is worth sustaining (or can be sustained) if it comes at the cost of the wellbeing of the people who make up that organisation. As noted in Lesson 1 - the people are the organisation.

In my first ‘real job’ after closing down, I found it strange when a senior business strategics complimented us on our bravery to close Share Shed. Bravery is not often associated with the orderly winding up of a not-for-profit. Although I didn’t ask him to elaborate, perhaps it was brave to recognise what really mattered to the team in the end and finish up in a way that still left room for a legacy gift. After the sale of all our assets, we had almost $11,000 to gift to another organisation. Our legacy was to substantially boost the chances of success of another Library of Things that had sprung up a few years after we started. If we had fought to the bitter end, I doubt we would have had such a satisfying silver lining.

Some final thoughts:

• Winding up an organisation takes a lot more time than you realise. Pace yourself.
• Acknowledge that your organisation did not need to last forever to have been successful or have a deep impact.
• Seek advice on options for closing before you reach a crisis point. We mapped out several scenarios based on what we legally needed to do and what seemed feasible. Having a plan really helped manage the emotional fall out as well because we knew what was coming and could prepare. It still hurt like hell, but we all helped each other through it and paced ourselves.
• Have a party. Grieve. Celebrate.

And in conclusion, running any kind of not-for-profit is a daunting task no matter your level of experience.

Most grassroots organisations, like Share Shed, are completely volunteer-run and may always be volunteer-run. This is both their beauty and their burden.

I hope this article has impressed upon you the need to be as professional and strategic as possible with the resources you have without becoming straight and boring! If you can balance the work to keep your unique culture alive and attractive to those who want to give their time – or support you with a savvy, strategic approach to recruitment and operations – I believe you will do great things.