Last week, we highlighted the exponential spike in the collective budgets of bike/walk advocacy organizations over the past 20 years. Perhaps not surprisingly, our State of the Movement report also showed that the People Powered Movement has invested those dollars in dramatically increasing its staff capacity.
In 1996, the 12 member organizations of the Alliance had just 10 full-time employees. That number skyrocketed to 1,100 full-time staff across 211 organizations by 2014. The pace of growth has accelerated in recent years, with staff doubling in size since 2013. The average size of staffed organizations is now six people.
However, passion — rather than pay — is still a key catalyst for the People Powered Movement. Fully one-third of Alliance member organizations are volunteer run, and 10% have only one full-time employee.
Compared to the wider non-profit sector — when examining organizations with fewer than 50 staff — Alliance member organizations were only slightly more likely to be staffed by fewer than 10 people. According to a 2014 Nonprofit Times report, 82% of non-profits had 10 or fewer staff, while the Alliance membership is closer to 90%.
Executive director was the most common position held among surveyed organizations, with 81% of respondents reporting such a position. (Because only 67% of members have paid staff, it is not possible for 81% to have a full time executive director. Our assumption is that organizations reported significant volunteer and full time positions.)
Other departments that were most likely to have dedicated staff included membership and/or volunteer coordination (56%), communications and/or marketing (55%), advocacy and/or policy (52%) and administration and/or finance (49%). The least represented departments or positions were planning and/or consulting (18%), equity and/or women’s programming (14%), deputy director (14%) and transit-specific programming (3%).
As is the case with many small organizations, most employees do not perform only one task, but wear many hats to fill in whatever gaps exist. It is possible therefore that organizations checked multiple boxes per staffer. In future iterations of our survey, we may restructure the question to be more specific to official staff designations.
It’s also important to note that, while still a small percentage, program staff dedicated to equity or women’s programming is a relatively new trend, quickly rising in prominence over the past several years. In addition to programming like city- and state-level Women’s Bicycling Forums, organizations are dedicating current staff resources, in areas like outreach, to specific communities that have been underserved in the past.
