Who's task: Office Staff or Volunteers?

[fotoscout]

For many years, a nearby government facility has hosted a semi-annual MB workshop. It is for one of the more difficult MBs, and needs particular expertise to do properly. Historically, the facility has handled the event in its entirety; advanced registration, overflow lists, communication, scheduling, and of course the event itself were all handled by the govt facility as a kind of neighborly thing to do. Unfortunately, they no longer have the ability to handle any of the up front administrative work and have asked us to take over that part of it.

 

Is it unreasonable to expect the Council office staff to take over this function, or, should this function move to the volunteers?

 

 

 

[Fat Old Guy]

I'd go with volunteers. If you expect paid staff to do it, Council will demand their kickback. Council might want a kick back anyway if you list it as a council or district event. Maybe you could "volunteer" for the facility and that way the facility could still be running it on paper and the council wouldn't be there with their hand out.

 

Just my thoughts.

 

BTW, the possesive of "who" is "whose".

 

 

[Eamonn]

I think that it ought to be the volunteers.

The office staff won't be there on the day.

We tend to use the Service Center as the place to mail the registrations and paper work too and the girls in the office are good at compiling lists Mainly just who has applied and where they are from: Troop, Name, Address and phone number. They are now getting used to E-mail addresses. Still they have no idea of who is doing what or how many can do it.

Even at some of the large council events like a Pow Wow, the final list is made up by the Pow Wow Chair and the committee. It might be an idea to form a small committee to take care of this.

Eamonn

[Bob White]

If it's a district or council event then it should be run according to the conditions determined by the council advancement and the committee's professional advisor. What have they decided? Most likely it will be a sharing of tasks between the two.

 

There are a number of benefits to having many of the administrative duties handled by the council service center staff.

First of all they are already on the payroll to do this sort of work for the volunteers you might as well use their resources.

 

The money collection and distribution needs to be accounted for, you might as well let the council finance manager do it from the start.

 

The office has the time and skills to handle the administration so that volunteers are free to focus on program.

 

I would turn it over.

[Fat Old Guy]

A while back, I had a conversation with a very grumpy Scouter at the Council offices. He had been in charge of the District dinner for many years and never had any problems until that year. He used to have everyone send him their reservations and payments and he'd pay the caterers, etc., etc..

 

Well, Council decided that they didn't like this so now they wanted all checks and reservations to go to the council office. Now this poor Scouter had to lay out his own cash to pay the caterer and wait for reimbursement. To make life more fun, he had to drive 30 miles to the council office to get the reservation forms.

 

Did it run any smoother? Not in his mind.

[Proud Eagle]

Use the council in the ways it can be used, but don't have them do anything that could be better accomplished by someone else. Let me provide some examples of problems created by having the council do more than it needs to.

 

Our OA Lodge decided to create a preregistration system for events. The idea was we could then purchase supplies with a better idea of quantity and at a reduced price by buying in bulk further in advance. This would also allow fine tuning program plans. We decided reducing the fee by $5 for early registration and requiring it by in to the council at least two weeks before the event. This all sounded very good.

 

However there turned out to be some problems. The council frequently failed to compile the information on who had preregistered in time for us to have a copy of the list at the event. Then there was the problem of people who attempted to preregister within two weeks of the event. Council would frequently take it even if it contained only the early fee. Sometimes it would be several weeks after an event before the issue of who had actually paid in advance was sorted out.

 

Then there was the money problem. The lodge is not allowed to keep the amount of cash on hand to pay all the expenses of an event. The lodge is also not allowed to have a seperate account that could be accessed by the lodge leadership. Instead all money is deposited directly into the council account that no one in the lodge has the ability to access. So it was thought that a logical way to handle this would be to ask council for a cash advance to purchase food and what not. However council said that was impossible because they only write checks twice a month and could not provide funds until the preregistration information had been compiled and a request for funds based on that information approved. Obviously that meant it was impossible to get a cash advance. So the entire preregistration system had been defeated.

 

That left the lodge with only a few options. For a while we did what the council wanted. We simply purchased everything from places that had an agreement with the council for a tab, or that would allow us to buy now and pay later. That worked until angry requests from grocery stores, patch companies, etc started coming in. What we found out was the council was never in a hurry to get the money to anyone. Then we found other suppliers that had never been paid in full by the council for expenses related to other events and therefore would not even do business with the lodge even if we could pay in advance. There is even a case of one Scouter who personally paid for needed supplies, had his request to be reimburst approved, and has been patiently waiting (and reminding) the council for at least 3 years. Last I knew he had finally given up on it after coming home from a deployment to Bosnia.

 

That left the Lodge with one remaining option to pay for event expenses. We would simply have to use walk on cash payments to meet critical expenses such as food and work out anything else later. That usually worked, though the trading post sometimes had to be raided for extra cash because too many people paid with checks. So, everything was under control until the council came up with yet another brilliant new accounting plan. The new plan was that walk on fees would have to be collected by the Staff Advisor and deposited. The concept was based on the theory that the money was being paid to the council, and so it had to go through normal council accounting procedures, meaning none of it could be spent until after being collected and then expenditures being approved. That simply was not going to work. At one event things were so bad that a scheme was cooked up to keep the Staff Advisor busy and away from registration until after the money had been spent. In that way he had at least a small bit of an excuse when he was asked why he came back with less money than what was collected.

 

If you are wondering why we simply didn't change the way we did registration that was because we had already had the years registration procedures and fees approved and had published them. Therefore we were not allowed to change that year.

 

In the intervening time the Lodge Advisor worked out a slightly better arangement with council. (Rumor has it that someone may be fronting the money for things and then being paid by council, a risky thing as previously noted.) This year the Lodge has also changed its registration procedures in hopes of avoiding much of the problem. Only time shall tell.

 

On a side note, if anyone thinks this only happens in a very bad council, think again. The council has been a quality council for many years running.

[Eamonn]

I do agree that all money collected ought to be accounted for following the accounting procedures that the Council has in place.

You don't mention if this is a District or a Council Event. If it is a District Event, you would want to work with the District Advancement Committee. If it is a Council Event you might want to see if one of the professionals could be made available.

A lot would depend on the size of the Office Staff. As a small council we don't have a big staff and there are times when they are stretched to the limit.

Eamonn

[nldscout]

Our district is 2-3 hr drive from our council office. When the 2 councils here merged the new council wanted all the money sent to them for registration and then they would pay the bills they said.

 

Beacause of time and distance our dustrict basically told them to take a hike on that. Now the sponsoring troop collects the fee. Spends what is needed and turns left over and recept for expenses to council.

 

So far no complaints from the auditors.

[Eamonn]

While having a Troop collect the money might/ does work in your district. I wouldn't be too happy if our district was to start doing this. As a district we do not have any way of holding money. We don't have a district Bank account, we don't want one and it is against the rules of our council. I don't know what the ruling is outside of our council. As all the money that goes into a unit account belongs to the chartered organization I can't see how a unit could manage it?

There could be a problem if the money is lost, stolen or mishandled. I also like the idea of not having to deal with people that might get upset.

We had a Chap who paid his fee for Wood Badge. All the money went through the Service Center( A little over $12k) He decided for some reason not to come to the second part of the course. He wanted half the fee back. It was made clear from the get go that this was non-refundable. He E-mailed and wrote to me. I didn't have to deal with him I just referred him to the Service Center. The money he paid was to the Council not me.

Eamonn

[fotoscout]

Hello everyone,

 

Im glad to not be the only one debating this.

 

There is no money associated with this event, so thats a non-issue. The key issues are the registration process, communication, promotion (although slight), and, maintenance of the overflow list. Year-in and year-out, the facility puts on a top notch workshop for us. It is open to boys from any council. Historically, most of the boys are from our council, but, there are usually boys registered from two other nearby councils.

 

My concern is that we (BSA) dont embarrass the facility because a volunteer didnt effectively do the job, or, that the facility falls pray to the revolving door of volunteers.

 

I have enough on my plate, and got pulled into this because of another function that I coordinate between BSA and the facility. Since the workshop has been put on and managed entirely by the facility, I don't think that this has ever been categorized as a District or Council event. So, there really is no precedent here. I think I'll go to the advancement chair with it.

 

Thanks for the input.