We are a bicycle club.

Our volunteers contribute in two areas, leading rides (about 350 per year) and contributing labor at events such as picnics (6 or 8 events per year).

At the end of the year we compile volunteer efforts and award prizes for outstanding participation.

We do not publish ordinary rides or picnics as 'Events', so keeping track via Events will not work.

We need a form for admins to enter into member records the date and name of their volunteer efforts. Both fields are free form, not defined by an "Event" (maybe that could be optional for those who want to keep track by defined Events).

We have the following categories of people to track:

Board members

Standing Committee members

Task force members (short-term committee)

Moderators (for lectures at our annual conference)

Event participants (for a specific job, like our silent auction, door monitors at conferences)

We would like to track days, hours, specific job tasks, mileage (where appropriate)

We would like the ability to post jobs, days/hours required, and to let them choose their slots

Putting my bid in for this as well! We need to track:

1. What positions a member volunteers for. Best case, this would be effectively unlimited - someone over the years can volunteer in a wide range of positions, and we want to track history.

2. Whether they're active in those positions or not - i.e., is this something they're currently doing, or did in the past? We want to be able to contact - for instance - everyone who's been a past Programs board member so we can have a brainstorm session on future programs.

Sorry, no updates. Not within 2011 - we have not even figured out what is the basic functionality needed, still collecting initial input.

any updates on when even some basic functionality for volunteer management might be available?

Thanks Marie, really appreciate the details.

Dmitry,

We are a 140 person non-profit that collects used books throughout the year. Our volunteers sort, price, box and store books until our 2 day sale in February of each year. We collect close to 800,000 books (1 by 1) driving to individuals homes. It is imperative to keep our organization going that we track the following:

1. Volunteer TIME sorting, pricing and boxing books by type of sort. Volunteers now sign in on a daily basis in a book with a spreadsheet. We then transfer that info into excel and sort it a million times. It is extremely time consuming and not very accurate. I'd love a simple Sign In and Sign Out that would track the time spent at the warehouse. They would then be able to assign those hrs to a particular job. (We could use a drop down so we could change the specific type of sorting.)

2. Volunteer BOX COUNT as they pick up books throughout the city. We pick up form homes, offices, and our own drop boxes. Because we pick up close to 800,000 books it is important for us to track WHEN we receive books and from WHERE. (Zip code is what we use to track) This help us manage our set up of teams and future publicity. We also need to track how many boxes of books we are taking out of each of our 16 Drop Boxes spread across the valley. We compare these to previous years to know if a box is producing or needs to be moved.

3. Volunteer JOBS. We have NO PAID employees. Our 140 volunteers do EVERYTHING. From clean the bathroom at the warehouse, to take out the garbage, to program the computer. Our Board members, parliamentarian, treasurer, secretary also get points for doing their jobs. We need to have a date field, sign in and sign out, total time (1 hr = 1 pt) and what the job was. It is a lot like #1 above although MOST of the volunteer time is spent sorting and pricing books.

It sounds like a small operation with only 140 little old ladies collecting used books, but last year we brought in close to half a million dollars in 2 days at our sale! We give all of our proceeds away to local charities in our community. Last year we put in a minimum of 22,000 hrs of volunteer time!

Marie

A good list of features is here http://whentohelp.com (http://whentohelp.com/). Printable, or at least exportable, reports (schedule/timetable, volunteer contact list, who's doing what list) are important. Obviously integrated with the contacts database.

I would appreciate input from everybody on this - what are the specific functions you need related to volunteers? The more specific examples you can give us, the better.

I'd like to have a volunteer tracking component in Wild Apricot. Nearly all of my clients' organizations rely heavily on volunteers. Keeping track of them is a problem. It'd be great to have a way for volunteers to sign up for activities, time slots, etc. and communicate with them, as well as tracking their hours for the year or whatever time frame. Using the events database to do this (i.e., creating a "Volunteer for..." event) is possible but really doesn't cut it for any but the simplest projects.

I definitely support this functionality. Our treasurer currently receives monthly "donated service logs" that track our board of directors' donated time, expenses, mileage, meals, etc.

We currently use Google Docs to process this information, but more sophisticated tracking system associated with member profiles would be great!

Thanks Charri,

Capabilities of the current version related to volunteer management are quite limited - but this definitely an area we are interested in and I hope to see comments on this thread as well as other requests for volunteer-related functionality.

I see that event volunteers are still a hot topic. Our organization is 175 ladies who raise money and perform service hours in our local community. We have a need to not only track the total hours worked, but to record board officer's hours, recruit event and planning committees, day of event volunteers and multi-day volunteers. Mostly in the manner already described. We currently utilize Signupgenius.com and speadsheets for this function (with lots and lots of errors) and would love to have some sort of integration with WA (or have signupgenius's functionality within WA)

No ideas, sorry. But we are aware of its importance.

We also are in desperate need of this feature. To be in good standing, you have to have volunteered so many hours, and its very hard to track. Some volunteers are not event attendees either - so we can't track it this way. Looks like this request has been talked about since 2008 - any idea when this might be implemented if ever?

Love this request. Hear, hear we need this!

We most specifically track volunteers needed to put on an alpine ski race. We do this today in a xls.

There are over 40 volunteers needed to put on a single day race. All our races are multiday events and most volunteers select to work an entire race.

Kari

Site admin - http://www.cmacskiracing.com

Keith, I can't think of any app that would suit this purpose. You can of course embed any Javascript widget into a page but it would have no interaction with WA database.

I think that you've correctly stated the basic func spec for this feature.

I would like to support the observation that this is a CRITICAL need for my organization and I'd loved to be able to use WA for this purpose.

However, given that, even under the best of circumstances this will take months, may be years for WA to get to, can I ask for suggestions about free-standing open source apps that would do some of the basics that could just be displayed inside a WA web page? Anybody have ideas?

I'm assuming that there aren't hidden gotchas in calling an app from within a WA page.

Liz R has done a great job of articulating our needs. Presently we are using both Filemaker Pro and Excel 2007 to handle these tasks that she lists but it would be great if it were integrated into WA. I am a huge WA fan and would love to see it go into the volunteer management area.

Here are our needs. We have 1 huge booksale a year. It takes us 363 days to get it ready for it and 2 days to execute it. (last year we took in over 600,000 books! We track our 150 volunteers throughout the year. We also track the number and type of books we bring in each year. Then we sell the books during a 2 day event. It takes us 1200 volunteers to staff the 2 day event. We need:
* Set up jobs by shift
* Assign number needed per job per shift
* Allow volunteers to self sign up until shift is full

* Administratively change/assign volunteers to individual shifts
* Provide an email to volunteer of what shift they are assigned to, when and where to report, and the duties of the job.
* Print badges by volunteer for all shifts (Sat shifts on 1 badge, Sun on another)
* Email follow up with thanks.
* Report of each job for supervisor of who is assigned to which shift so the Supervisor knows who to expect.
* Report of no shows
* Report of each vol and hrs worked.

Other than that, we don't have any other pressing needs. Ha ha. Funny, right?

Thanks for considering these issues.

Marie

Marie,

Thank you very much for posting! Even though we are still some time away from working on this functionality, this kind of input is essential for us to start brainstorming the overall direction and understanding our clients needs!