We've used Salesforce for volunteer management as well as tracking contacts and donations. It ties in nicely with MailChimp so managing our email list is easy. Free for nonprofits, but it does take some work to learn to use.

As for volunteer management, the plugin Volunteers for Salesforce does a nice job of scheduling and allowing people to sign up online. For our uses, most volunteers do not sign up beforehand, so our shop days we still have a sign in sheet and one of us does the data entry. That works fine, as there's always some details to consider (Open Shop or earning vol hours? Purchase parts using volunteer hours?). For other events the online sign up works great as we can list schedule slots that need to be filled, and it closes those times that we have enough people to cover. I did create a calculated field for our contacts that counts volunteer hours - hours spent (a custom field) to give us hours available. So when someone is wanting to buy a fork, 2 tubes and a lock we can tell them at a glance how many hours they have available and whether they have enough. In this case, that's 6 hours needed! 15 hours get you a bike to fix up.

Jack Murphy

Volunteer Coordinator

Bike Walk Wichita

On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 8:14 AM Christine Hill <christine.tyler@gmail.com> wrote:

Not super helpful, but emailing mostly to commiserate: at Old Spokes Home we tried When I Work, a custom Google Form, a white board sign up system... and scrapped it all because we found these organized systems worked only for a fraction of the volunteers, just like the lack of a system seemed to work just for a fraction of the volunteers. But the lack of a system required less management. Both were imperfect systems that resulted in semi-frequent inconveniences. We never cracked the code.

As far as retention goes, I found that maintaining an updated volunteer email list and sending out specific requests (we need x volunteers on y day) were super helpful. Partnering up new volunteers who seem super interested with experienced volunteers always made the newbies feel empowered and important and able to run things a little bit more because they had a good model and relationship. And personal asks are always super effective. If someone good hadn’t shown up lately I’d shoot them an email to say we missed them (without trying to guilt them in any way, life happens).

Hope you’re well!

Christine Hill
(339) 223-0722

On Dec 29, 2018, at 2:42 PM, Audrey Wiedemeier <audrey@bikelibrary.org> wrote:

Greetings, Folks:

Does anyone have advice/suggestions/insight into these or other volunteer scheduling systems? I am testing out: Freehub, Flipcause, When I Work, Volgistics, and Freecyclerys rad spreadsheet.

Right now we have no scheduling system, but rather operate with a "just show up at these times" system. Keyholders let me know when they can't be at their regularly scheduled program and then I cover.

We have about 15 core volunteers (volunteer 4-6 time a month), and 15 active volunteers (they come once or twice a month). The main issue that I hope to resolve is volunteer retention and making all folks feel welcome to be a part of the organization. I realize there are many other benefits to implementing a scheduling system, as well as way to retain volunteers.

Thank you in advance!

Peace & grease,

Audrey Wiedemeier (She/her/hers)
Iowa City Bike Library, Director

700 S. Dubuque St, Iowa City
Hours: Sat. 10-3, Mon. 5-7, Tues. 6-8,
Wed. 6-8, Thurs. 6-8, Fri. 4:30-6:30

BikeLibrary.org
C: (515) 450-1651

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