A while back I wrote a post about the marketing and business side of what I was doing with our league, Resurrection Roller Girls out of Rohnert Park, CA. I’ve been working with RRG for bit over a year now, so I can rewrite it with some details and notes now that we’ve seen what’s happened. Organizational strategy is just as important as the strategy you employ on the track. The behind the scenes work is what allows that to happen.

In late 2016 our league decided to start a restructuring process, based partly on research my colleagues and I got together. This included reorganizing how volunteers work, flattening communications, rethinking volunteer team and developing a new marketing plan with all sorts of details we’ll cover later.

The most controversial changes by far were to the committees. Our critical proposals were:

Eliminate the volunteer requirement for rostering Remove committees, replace with fluid volunteer system Streamline the rules

This was done in conjunction with integrating modern communications. You have to be able to talk to each other. Below I’ll explain what each point means in detail, why we did it, and what the results look like.

Volunteer Requirements

The old policies included language about ‘committee work’. A lot of leagues have something like this. Be assigned to a committee, do your tasks, have an hour of volunteer time a week, whatever else. It might work for you in some situations. It didn’t work for us for a few reasons.

First, your members pay money for the chance to give up their weekends and perform as athletes on their own time while wearing expensive gear they had to work to buy. They are your customers. And they don’t owe you anything. So that’s the ethical side. The more practical side is considering who you want at your outreach events. Someone who loves introducing the world to the sport of roller derby, or someone who’s watching the clock until they hit their minimum?

Isabelle Ringer of the San Diego Derby Dolls mentioned this in a class at Rollercon last year. They got rid of volunteer requirements, and who showed up to volunteer? The exact same people that did it before. Now you don’t have to track the hours, people don’t feel forced into anything and volunteering becomes fun. If it isn’t, you should make it fun.

The last point is that your skaters already have a job. Skating well. If you are able to build a corps of non skating or rec skating volunteers, your competitive members can focus on their skills without getting bogged down. I don’t skate, and I do everything. It can happen. If your league has too much of a problem with laziness, do what my archery club does. Dues are an extra $15 if you don’t do an hour of volunteering. Best case scenario, people volunteer to save cash. Worst case, you hire someone to cover what they could have been doing since you have the cash.

The results: people are, generally, happier. They don’t feel like draconian laws are keeping them off the roster, the volunteers are able to fit in organically without the overhead of assignments and record keeping.

Committees

I don’t know the history of how roller derby came to use committees for everything. But we do. Coaching committee, interleague committee, marketing committee, so forth. Our old policy language included “assigning” people to committees, and requiring meetings. So we got rid of it. I’m not against committees, and people still use them in our league. But it’s no longer required. Here’s why.

A standard BoD — committee — volunteer relationship works sort of like this:

It’s a clear hierarchy. Somehow volunteers end up on a committee. That committee has a head, who reports to someone above them. Maybe they belong to a board member, manager, the entire board, whatever else. But it’s linear, with limited pathways. Obviously I’m exaggerating, but the idea is still roughly what used to be in place. Especially when you assign people to committees early in their career. Even if you don’t explicitly say it, the language makes people feel separate.

We went with a more agile and fluid system. Instead of forming committees, our Directors all have the ability to provide agents with a portion of their own power and responsibility. So instead of adding people to a media committee in a formal way, I can ask for help on a project. Or I can provide full access to social media accounts to an individual. It looks more like this:

Here’s the best part: people can talk to each other, and they aren’t pigeonholed. Communication runs in every direction to everyone.That means that even though I gave that person social media access, the Director of Sponsorship might still use them as a sponsor liason. And why not? Both things are related. They don’t need to go through me for everything.

Instead of being assigned to roles with rigid titles, volunteers are able to organically gravitate to what they’re good at and — more importantly — what they actually want to do. There has to be benefit to keep your volunteers engaged. Some volunteers are given the power to recruit other volunteers within their particular piece of the department. If the Director of Marketing imbues me with the authority to make all marketing decisions, I can now imbue another person with the ability to work on web design. They can get someone to help with graphics. As long as everything is communicated, we don’t have to go to the board or the committee or whatever else with everything. We can function in a streamlined and dynamic way, quickly adjusting. This is the new way of doing things, now that technology allows us to be in constant contact.

How is it working out? Collaboration is higher than ever before, and people feel empowered. That’s resulted in a lot more work getting done, with a lot less effort going in. Fluid membership in departments means that we can scale depending on current needs. Our merch person was able to recruit help and get a lot done without ever talking to us, because we gave her that ability, leaving us to do other high priority tasks.

Streamline

I like the word ‘streamline’. Not sure if you caught that. It reminds me of making super fast jets, which are always cool.

Equally cool, this meant going through the policies and bylaws with a fine toothed comb and considering everything. Does it all fit together? Does it have a tangible benefit? Is it understandable? If not, it got cut. The policies document was 18 pages when I started. It went down to 9, and that’s with a lot of added in page breaks. The Board of Directors went from 11 to 7.

Smaller isn’t always better. But by reducing everything down we made the policies understandable to everyone, accessible. That means we aren’t getting stuck trying to read through and interpret everything for new situations, and newbies can feel involved because it’s an easy read and everything blends together. A lot of topics were generalized so that we can decide things on a case by case basis, with policy guidance. We didn’t really lose anything meaningful.

Dropping the size of the Board included an implied change in purpose, and a real change in job description. The Director of Coaching no longer coaches everything; she oversees the department. That means the coaches answer to her, but she doesn’t have to be in the field. Empowering teams is now the most important part of leadership. And it should be. It probably already is for you if you work in a decently large league, but smaller leagues like ours still have to learn it.

Closing

That’s part one. In my original post this was two paragraphs.

tldr; we stopped requiring volunteer hours and started using a fluid way of delegating tasks. Also simplified the policies. It’s going well.

I’m not saying what we did is the best approach, and I’m not telling you what to do with your own organizational strategies. Though I’ll happily hire myself out to do that one on one. Your needs may be different and your demographics different. But these philosophies are serving us well, and we’re seeing unprecedented growth, engagement and general happiness within the league.

So what’s my advice for you? Make sure your system is organized to let everyone thrive in their own space. Let it work for your league members, not against. And, if you’re hoping to push forward on growth, make sure whatever system you have in place can scale to where you want to be. Most of all, remember that this is a game you like to play. Everyone’s here for the same reason. Have fun.