Online Volunteer Sites

[Elizabeth Waters]

Originally Posted by lynca

I'm interested in learning how teams organize volunteers. More specifically, throughout the build season, how do you assign parents or teachers shifts.

I've only used google surveys to coordinate volunteers and it usually fails after someone decides to change their schedule.

I'm thinking about trying out VolunteerSpot website,

If you'll remember from your days on CRyptonite, our team has a parent booster club from where we draw almost all of our mentors (save a few of the "old-timers" who've been with the team even after their children graduated).

Our lead build mentor invites any parents/"old-timers" to a meeting at which he discusses the roles/responsibilities of the 624 mentors and asks the adults to write down which day(s) are best for them. He then compiles a spreadsheet--which this year we posted on Google Docs--for the entire six-week build season, assigning two adults to be "on shift" per night.

If there's ever a night when an adult cannot make it, that adult usually emails the lead build mentor/other key adults ahead of time so that another adult can take their place for the evening.

Now, we're fortunate enough to have a pretty strong mentor base, so we've never come across a night when less than two mentors are present (we have a two-mentor-per-night requirement for the safety of the students), so this sytem has worked well for us.

Additionally, posting/sharing the spreadsheet via Google Docs was a big plus for obvious reasons: the spreadsheet could be updated by our build mentor and the adults could see the revisions immediately without the lead having to send out an email with the new spreadsheet, which tends to cause confusion as to which spreadsheet is the "correct" one.

No "fancy" methods for us.

PM me if you'd like to see this.

Best of luck!