Community After Cash Drop

[John Norris]

Anyone have experience, or a good guess, about originally volunteer based communities that find themselves being 'awash' in cash? Well not exactly 'awash'...

I'm thinking of a hypothetical community that catches the interests of a business. The business decides to invest...perhaps funding a moderator, subject matter expert, updating the communities technology, or things like that. How might a business do this without negatively effecting the community?

I would assume that a business coming in might be tough on a community by itself, but the addition of money (some are now paid and some are not) might be an even bigger factor.

Any insights are appreciated.

John

[Jill Biddington]

Hi John,

My background is in community organising and trade unions so although they are real life communities, I don't feel that the challenges and outcomes will be incredibly different.

There is actually quite a lot written about the development of grass roots organisations to bureaucracies to social institutions about member based organisations - Prof. Michael Newman of UTS is someone who has written of this in a number of books.

The challenge when the group is able to self fund and the roles within the community are undertaken by some paid and some continuing volunteers is to retain the energy and relevance to the membership. In early stages, for a variety of reasons, some of the stalwart volunteers adopt a view that now that someone is paid, then they can do all of the work, or the more challenging work and that volunteers are no longer needed, others will grip tightly to their roles and oppose any changes, others will retain an involvement but as culture bearers and closely scrutinise and micro manage any paid people as servants. Rarely does the density or participation of volunteers increase thus giving rise to further internal pressures for additional paid positions, and an increase in the resentment factor is more often felt creating a sense of us and them division. If the continuum of development is standard then with the successful settling down of the organisation and the next level of success is attained then there are a range of reasons why the bureaucracy of the organisation may close itself off from the grass roots and there is a danger that an elite language shared between volunteers and paid officials and there is a move away from participative engagement from members and they are "serviced" rather than engaged and they develop a client like relationship. Move on to the the next stage and a successful bureaucracy may attain the capacity and influence on broader groups and decision makers and become more like an institution than a group - in doing so it is another step away from the grass roots and so there is a greater challenge in remaining relevant and participative. The engagement is with peer organisations and other institutions and rather than work with members they report to members. Much of this is avoidable but many organisations that were built from grass roots membership and volunteerism tend to make the same mistakes and history repeats itself.

The way to manage this is for volunteerism to be valued and recognised and for roles to be created that don't remove or create obstacles for volunteers to continue to contribute - often at higher or deeper levels. Mindfulness about what is essentially important, avoidance of command and control methods of management can assist in avoiding the worst impact of developing an internal bureaucracy.

Does this help?

Jill

[John Norris]

Wow, Jill...that's fantastic.

Lots of things to think about, and thank you very much for citing someone who has published in this area. I can foresee this happening as more businesses get involved online.

Thanks again!

John