Quote Originally Posted by SteveinMN View Post
I've been fighting that in a couple of organizations.

In one, anyone who did anything for the organization became an officer (You collect pop cans and turn them in for money for the club? You're an officer! Here's your title!) which became incredibly unwieldy. People "faded", they had an argument with someone in the club and left the organization, they moved to Arizona for the winter and their job didn't get done for several months, they passed on, etc. Of course, they still wanted to vote on organizational business.

That was changed when we overhauled our charter and bylaws. Just five officers and appointees for special projects whose terms run no longer than a year (if the issue is still there, the new president has to appoint them or someone else to the position for another year). If you want to be in on the action, become an officer. None of this grandfathered for life do it when you feel like it and keep it to yourself business. And we have one place (cloud) where we record the stuff we need to know on a continuing basis -- who holds the key to our event venue, who's listed as a signer for checks, where our state paperwork is, etc.

At another organization, we needed to update our Web site for the coming year. "Dan" was kind enough to foot the bill for hosting so the club didn't have to pay for it. But he alone got all the notices from the hosting company. Now he's decided he wants to take a break from being so active with the organization. He didn't relinquish anything proactively, though. The current club president had to ask Dan for the password to the Web site when no one else could get into it to update it. It took a few weeks to get a hold of Dan. Thank the stars he wasn't run over by a truck or something... I'm now the Webmaster and when I changed the password, the president and treasurer were told what it is. We're not going through that again.

They're volunteer help and God love 'em that they volunteer as long as they do (that gets tougher all the time). But there still is the requirement to run like a business. That seems to be difficult for most people to understand.
I am leading the rewriting of our bylaws for our 50 year old neighborhood organization. We are expanding the number of elected officers as current president wishes,As part of our pattern of adding a new elected officer about every 2 to 3 years.

Already the Board has become unwieldy in size and I think the next major bylaws rewrite will be to squeeze it down and trim off maybe up to half of elected officers. But I will be long gone by that time. Congratulations Steve on getting your officers reduced to five!

It’s kind of ironic that as I actively participate in this bylaws revision to add yet another position, I see that we really need to trim them. But whatever.

I do get to do something dear to my heart: cut out huge swaths of very detailed procedural yammering in our bylaws that were introduced by two presidents in particular. I had to do research on one of them to identify who did it.Another article that was impossible to understand (very specifically written for a contentious issue, now dead) was put into place by a friend of mine when he was president.The new people on the board have no clue what that is about when they read it.

We already have enough trouble with our organization not following bylaws so my main goal was to simplify it and write clearly the limits of the Board of Directors.

Steve, as for passwords and digital storage — that has been the most frustrating thing about my organization in modern times. They’re like demonic toddlers, their attention span is so short. The biggest problematic fade was with someone who was straightening up access points to all of our digital accounts. You could imagine the problems that resulted when she faded and we turned over two presidents within two months. I’m still trying to sort that out but my attention is not especially welcome yet they don’t know what they don’t know.