Looked into this long long ago. There’s two major items most potential volunteers don’t account for:
1. Most organizations have very high mechanical knowledge standards. A&P is often a requirement on top of pilot certifications. Your dime.
2. Most organizations expect the candidate to do a significant portion of their own fundraising — as high as 80% for some — to cover the complete costs. This includes everything from “salary” to aircraft procurement, modification, maintenance, and regular operational costs.
Obviously the second one varies significantly depending on size of org and how much of their revenue is “institutional” for lack of a better word.
But they definitely don’t need or really want “Joe Pilot who’s bored and wants to fly cheap”.
They need “Pilot willing to run their entire show as a business, do the vast majority of the work including most maintenance, and raise most of the capital needed annually to keep their individual plane flying and themselves fed.”
Show up with a plan for the money and a fundraising skill set. Otherwise they’ll be extremely polite and nice, but you won’t be flying for them. Almost all provide “home time” where you’re expected to be updating existing donors on status and pounding the pavement for new donors.
In the end, the bills have to get paid. You’re the public face of the org and better be good at presenting to large audiences and know which large audiences you can access and how much they’ll typically give.
The bigger orgs have some people doing that who are ex-pilots or professional fundraisers and a back office to help collect, analyze, etc... but the donors want to see and hear from the current pilots.
