Late response, but hope this helps.

We are currently using a waitlist for our Earn-A-Bike program. It is not a literal list and requires no overhead. If participants show up during one of the scheduled class times and a scheduled participant does not show or there are extra volunteers to handle more participants, they can get into the program. This works particularly well now that we have scheduled program times. We do occasionally turn people away, but we have many people sign up for the program and not show, so this fills in those holes.

An idea swirling in the void is to put weights on applicants so that a low-income individual would be higher on the list to start a program than a rich college kid who already has 3 bikes and doesn't need to do the program. This would require a robust database or a lot of overhead.

Brett Schager Volunteer and Outreach Coordinator Community Cycles brett@communitycycles.org

On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 2:23 PM, Patrick VDT fivespeed_@hotmail.com wrote:

Hello everyone,

Im curious to find out how people are managing wait lists for programs.

More specifically, are you picking students for your programs or is it first come first served on a sign up list.

If you are picking students, what criteria are you using?

We are starting to get more attention than we want to handle at this point. So we have programing slots for 350 students but we have 5-600 students sign up for the wait list. Up until this point we have always done first come first served. But we are trying to avoid telling a kid : Thanks for signing up, we will see you in 8 months when we have an opening.

Thanks Patrick

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