Honorarium Payments

Jim, your point has been made by several others and is a valid sentiment but possibly not matching the context of DMS in 2019. As I am told the history, DMS was at a point where there simply were not enough members willing to teach classes and the honorarium program was implemented to draw out more teachers. As time went on, the leadership even adjusted the rules so that $100 of General Fund money would be distributed for classes even if there were only 3 attendees. The incentives were successful in drawing teachers to the point that the cash outflow exceeded not only expectations, but also went beyond the point of affordability.

Now your point expresses a sentiment that teaching should be voluntary and without financial recompense of any fashion (presumably beyond class supplies reimbursement) What this wish seems to overlook is what is happening in membership volume growth and member churn.

Look at this chart from @Brandon_Green:

In Y2014, maybe we average about 40-45 new adds/month.The monthly drops rate maybe average about 25. Presuming Adds require some amount of training, teachers are training low 40’s to increase membership by 15-20 folk.

Y2015, the numbers are about the same ratio: Add 40-50, train ~80. Same ratio, but it is twice the number of people to be trained every month.

Y2018, the situation is way worse: Add 40-50, train ~140.

Could it be that you reach a point were both absolute numbers and churn creates such a large training demand for relatively small membership growth that expecting members to volunteer to meet that demand is just simply unrealistic?

Some seem to be convinced that addressing the drop out rate is beyond DMS control. What is happening is a revamped PR effort to attract new members. I will not be surprised if there is not some repeating of history as DMS finds the need once again to have to figure out how to meet the demand for teachers. The inquiry made by this OP and the numerous others starting to show up asking for classes do seem to be suggesting this.

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Bert,

you seem to be misunderstanding my point. It’s not a statement in any way we should get rid of it, but that we have a problem in that we whilst we have encouraged “volunteers” when we need to cultivate volunteers. We need to make this a space where people want to volunteer at, or drive in more people who are willing to.

-Jim

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No, Jim. I get that. I’m just saying that if you continue to operate the Space with policies and practices that require large numbers of people to be trained, keep a hands off approach in place to address the drop out rate, you wear your volunteers out. There are only so many subject experts who both have the personal time to spend and can teach effectively. The previous honorarium program appears to have helped people make the time available. The current system is struggling. Who knows if it will gain traction. I hope it does. Concerned that it may not. I also would like to discuss the “high pay” teacher issue in person. Think there is far more to that story than has been advanced by various parties.

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and what I’m saying is we need to drive towards encouraging others that would volunteer towards volunteering. Getting more people comfortable with teaching various things, identifying people that could teach as they join, etc.

If we keep trying to throw money at it, we are not fixing the core problem.

5 figures of income / year from DMS is pretty high to still call oneself a “volunteer.” Some of these people have indicated that they only make the time available because it’s time they now don’t have to work at another job. This means it’s no longer a thank you for volunteering, but supplanting traditional income for them.

This isn’t only a matter of finances, but a matter of culture. We have had new teachers come in because they are under the impression they could make it a new job teaching regularly (I’ve already have to handle some of that directly).

In metal for example we didn’t just try to throw money at it, we took the effort to get more members comfortable teaching. Those classes have started to go up recently. The reduced honorarium didn’t stop that, but it grew because we focused on building the people.

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As I said … in person. There’s more to the story that you may not have been told.

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It’s already been well drawn out over various threads; one of the threads a member even stated part of the rationale for the decisions made by their group was higher honorarium payouts to the instructors. There are a handful of members that receive substantial honorarium payouts; I can’t be certain we’re talking about the same one anyway but the point stays the same regardless.

It’s not about trying to take away everything to teachers, but encourage the actual volunteers to be able to volunteer and get them to a comfortable enough position to do so in terms of their abilities, and confidence in the equipment.

what is the current system? I have been trying to keep an eye for board meeting notes that specify the new system but probably missed it.

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Well like you, I haven’t seen anything particularly official. But my understanding is honorarium classes generate $50 which is typically split between the committee and the instructor unless the instructor wants all of it to go to the committee. Somehow or another they try to manage that so it does not exceed a financial limit for the month. But the next line is that teachers are being encouraged to use Eventbrite as the vehicle for conducting classes wherein they can set the fee to be whatever they need it to be. Makerspace gets nothing from an Eventbrite class unless the instructor chooses to voluntarily donate some money.

We are still waiting on board approval of the new proposal.

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Makerspace gets nothing from an Honorarium class.

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Technically that is correct. But Makerspace committee does get something from an honorarium class. Sorry I didn’t make that more precise.

To elaborate more fully, if Makerspace throws an honorarium class with no fees it’s a net cost to the space whenever the instructor keeps the honorarium. if an instructor conducts an Eventbrite class where the students pay a fee, Eventbrite makes money from the fees that they charge, Makerspace only gets income if the teacher chooses to volunteer some of it. On the other hand if Makerspace were to conduct an honorarium class and charge the exact same fees that the Eventbrite teacher is charging that would be net income into the Makerspace organization. So, my point is that going with Eventbrite and student fees in place of honorarium and Makerspace fees is an avoidance of income for the Makerspace organization.

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The fees aren’t supposed to be income per say, but rather offset the costs of materials etcetera.

The problem if we try to charge more to pay instructors for those wishing to maintain a higher payout than the honorarium is it becomes very hard to manage and would have to be done to very high detail for IRS purposes. I like the idea, and would support it if we had that capability, but given the horrendous state of our current accounting software it’s not feasible. I’d like to reevaluate this when we improve our core accounting software.

ahem Quickbooks should be capable of handling payroll/contractor situations. I’ve done a small payroll using Quickbooks before.

It’s not all of QuickBooks, but the way ours is setup in particular. It doesn’t have fund management or clean class accounting, it was setup as a pure cash accounting.

Generating a report for a committee to determine their balance isn’t even a simple task.

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Interesting that it worked just fine for Multicam, Haas and any of the other big fee classes without any problem. Now suddenly it won’t work. Isn’t that odd?

We never paid instructors out of that. Those costs go towards the machinery, consumables, etc that make the space run.

Paying people is a bit different and requires much more rigorous accounting.

I’m somewhat able to see what classes got honorarium & who requested the honorarium. It’s not easy but I can get to it in a convoluted way in QuickBooks.

Jim, it’s not a new process. Collect the fees, pay an honorarium. Most teachers I’ve heard from would be perfectly fine just going back to honorarium and forgetting about having to deal with Eventbrite. For all the supposed wonderful benefits it is supposed to bring to instructors … it’s mainly just an administrative headache they don’t want.

Edit add: DMS opted to go with Eventbrite where teachers set the fee and keep as much of it as they want after Eventbrite fees. If DMS had simply added a few dollars of fees to each class and left the $50 honorarium program alone, you would have had peace in the building, money in the bank to eliminate the drain of too many classes, and not have to deal with members begging for classes to be conducted. And the accounting process would have worked as well as it ever did for fee based classes pre 2019.

Paying teachers anything other than honorarium absolutely is, or students suddenly finding they’re getting nickled and dimed for everything.

Stop making this sound like a simple solution, because it isn’t. When there is a problem of a balance between spending and income, unless you can get the base income up (without dependence on secondary income) it’s going to be a tough solution.

Of course they would, it’s money and less hassle. How about students having to pay for every course rather than just those where the teacher wants to make some extra cash? That has the potential to drop membership numbers further if just to get the required trainings start to add up quite a bit more.

The reason we didn’t go this route is some teachers still choose not to put extra fees on the classes.
As an org we don’t want to nickle and dime people every step of the way, especially for required classes.

Additionally, given that only 3 students are required to make an honorarium class, it makes for a lousy balance of fees versus payout. Raise the number of students, you end up with a problem of classes getting canceled because they “didn’t make”

There are a lot more moving parts here than simply “raise the fee”

If a teacher wants to make the cash higher because they don’t feel $25 is enough, they can put in the effort to make an eventbrite class. At that point they’re already not volunteering out of the nature of their heart or the benefit of the space, but for the financial incentive and they can do the extra few minutes of work. But for those of us that volunteer the time, we’d rather keep the classes open to everyone, at the minimal cost of consumables if necessary, to keep attendance up and members access to the tools.

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