Advice on starting 501(c)(3)

[brute]

Anyone start/run a charitable organization or private foundation?

Here's the backstory. My wife and I care deeply about the environment and proper conservation. We'd like to start an organization to raise funds for projects that we feel are moving in the right direction and we believe we can do more good with our own foundation that simply raising funds within another one that already exists. We both have experience raising funds for other non-profits, and ties to some deep pockets that we could lean on for initial funding to get things set up and moving forward.

I guess the question is: what are the pitfalls you've run into? Obviously we'll be consulting with accountants and lawyers, but I'd love to hear your stories from the trenches. Currently we're considering going the private foundation route, but it isn't set in stone, we're very much in the exploratory phase of this right now.

[mavendrill]

One big challenge potentially is volunteers.  Charities and foundations tend to attract willing like-minded people.

With zero exceptions, if you take on volunteers, do so for only two circumstances:
1) special projects where providing all requisite supervision and resources adds to and doesn't detract from your mission and necessarily have a defined timeline
2) in systemically sustainable long-term roles where you have the requisite resources and desires to supervise them.

Lots of charities run off 2 people or so, are constantly busy and see all the good more hands could do.  They see willing hands, and jump at the opportunity.  For the first day or week or maybe month, things work out but increasingly the time to manage and oversee the volunteers takes away from the mission, or you reach a point where you don't have enough volunteers to sustainably expand your reach, so their volunteering is just taking away from your work, which then leads to mutual burnout.

If you take on volunteers, expect to need to spend a ton of time managing them.  Until you get really good at managing volunteers (and it's a different skill than managing employees), expect them to take up most of your time.  Your challenge is to learn ways to scale their involvement to serve your mission while undergoing the massive turnover and reliability problems volunteers bring (and be ready to write endless letters of recommendation).

Allowing others to help out for free with your passion will completely and totally transform your organization.  If you go that route, do so because it's what you want, understanding it will completely change everything (most obviously your role).  It's ok to tell others you aren't in the position to effectively use their help.

[LifeHappens]

So, this is my professional field. 99% of the time, when someone asks about starting their own 501(c)3, I tell them it's probably not a good idea. There is probably an organization that already exists that is working on the problem you want to solve, or an ancillary problem. If that is the case it is almost always better to partner with that org, join the board and start guiding their work in your preferred direction. Doing the paperwork to start a 501 is time consuming and onerous, recruiting a board is a pain the ass and you probably won't be as effective as you'd hoped anyway.

Since I know you a little bit, brute, I can safely assume you've already looked at existing options and found them lacking. Just putting out my normal disclaimer for anyone else who finds this thread.

In your OP you state you are conflicted about if you want to start a direct service providing org, or if you're more interested in funding a foundation and doing some outside fundraising. So you need to make that choice before you can proceed, because those are two different legal entities. If you are more interested in contributing and raising money, you might want to look into setting up a Donor Advised Fund at your local community foundation https://www.cof.org/community-foundation-locator or with Vanguard/Fidelity/Schwab etc. This is a much cheaper way to go than establishing an independent foundation.

[brute]

Thank you both for your replies. Excellent points about volunteers, most people cost more energy to guide than they actually provide, and that's when they're getting a paycheck.

Huge thanks on the link there LH. There definitely are orgs that claim to be working towards solving issues in our preferred problem space, but yeah. They're lacking both in management and soul. We're in the process of reaching out to other groups that aren't as highly visible and will certainly consider lending our influence to them if they seem to be a good fit. The Donor Advised Fund is very similar to what we were considering last night, I will definitely look more closely at it this evening.

Again, I really appreciate the responses. This definitely isn't something to be taken lightly.