an opinionated volunteer is demanding too much of our small organization

A reader writes:

I am the sole full-time employee for a state-owned museum. Aside from a very part-time maintenance man, all work is on me. I am only able to pull off events or large group tours thanks to the labor of some very wonderful volunteers. Currently there are 10 or so local volunteers who are very active — they come to the monthly volunteer meeting, attend training sessions, and assist with most projects/events/tour groups/etc. Then there are another five or so volunteers who live further away and only come to help with a specific event or program, but otherwise aren’t regulars. Finally, there are two or three “volunteers” who I believe are worth keeping in the loop for their specific expertise, but who I wouldn’t consider as active.

One in particular, Liza, has been a challenge from my first day. She is very qualified — she is from one of the tribes the museum’s history covers — and can be great with visitors. But since I started this position nearly a decade ago, I can count on one hand the number of times she has shown up in person (she does live three hours away) and actively participated. I can go months without hearing from her, and when I do, it’s through her preferred method: spamming a series of one- to two-line long emails. Usually, they’re criticisms that X is a waste and why don’t we do Y, but without any offers to help or any practical suggestions of how to make improvements. This is a small museum with very strict limits on what I can do, what volunteers can do, and what our very limited budget can be spent on. She can’t seem to understand or accept this.

Her latest emails are about not being able to attend the monthly volunteer meetings, which are and always have been held in-person at the museum after normal operating hours. Even during Covid, what sporadic meetings we held were brief and socially distanced in our parking lot! We don’t have the setup to host adequate meetings via Zoom or a hybrid in-person/digital meeting. It isn’t a priority to correct this, when parts of the museum are literally falling apart. I believe it’s important to keep everyone informed, so I always send out a very detailed email the following day that recaps the meeting’s contents. This satisfies everyone else, even my (off-site) boss, but not Liza. I’m not sure how to accommodate her, or frankly if I even want to put in the effort to! She once threatened me and the museum with a discrimination lawsuit when I “fired” one of her buddies (the guy had a history of loudly and violently disagreeing with visitors and his fellow volunteers). Now she wants me to call her from my personal cell phone every meeting so she can participate. I don’t want her to have my personal contact info! How do I politely, but once and for all, get the message across that she needs to manage her expectations?

All you can do is calmly and firmly restate what is and isn’t an option.

So: “We’re not set up to do remote meetings, unfortunately, and the technology available to us doesn’t support it. You are always welcome to attend in person if you want to, and I will always send out detailed meeting notes the next day.”

There is a question of whether you should just bite the bullet and let her call in (she wouldn’t need to have your personal number to do that; you could use Google Voice). But if you don’t have the technology to support it, having one person attend via phone while everyone else is in person can change the way meetings feel: you can end up having to stop to repeat things, the person misses visual cues everyone else is getting (such as that they need to stop talking so the conversation can move on), and it can generally make things less efficient. Plus, if you’re going to let Liza do it, other people will want to as well, and at that point you need a better set-up. If the meetings are working well for everyone but Liza, and Liza isn’t a particularly active volunteer anyway, it’s not unreasonable to hold firm on sticking to the way that works for the largest number of people.

But that’s just that one issue, and it sounds like the pattern is the bigger problem. If Liza has shown up to volunteer less than five times in ten years and instead mostly sends aggravating emails criticizing the museum’s work … well, do you even want her as a volunteer anymore? That said, there can be a ton of politics involved in firing a volunteer, especially in the context you described, so your best bet may be just to firmly and cheerfully hold your boundaries. You’re not required to respond to every email she sends (or if you feel you need to, you can reply with something vague like “we’ll take a look at this” or “this can’t be a priority right now but I’ll put it on our list as we consider priorities for next year” or “thanks, appreciate you taking the time to send this”). You can also just cheerfully and firmly decline to modify things to suit her specific needs, as with the language above about the meetings.

You can’t make her manage her expectations; you can encourage that, of course, but ultimately you can only manage your side of it and how you respond to her.

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