Volunteer Recruitment Is Easy with VolunteerSpot.com
If you have ever planned an athletic charity event, you know that you could never pull off your event without volunteers, yet the volunteer recruitment process can be one of the hardest aspects of charity event planning. For the most part, volunteers are wonderful, dedicated, and reliable helpers; but because volunteering is not employment, it is subject to changes, cancellations, and other problems. This can make coordinating volunteers a challenging process.
I recently learned about a fantastic tool at VolunteerSpot.com. The site is designed to take the headaches out of volunteer recruitment and management. This web-based application is a free volunteer scheduler that can make volunteer coordination a breeze. Here’s how it works:
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The application includes a planning wizard that allows you to create files for each event requiring volunteers, including details like volunteer time slots, roles, and tasks.
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After creating your files, fill out an email database with all of your potential volunteers.
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When you need volunteers, send an invite out to your database. The email invitation includes two response options: No Thanks/Not This Time and Sign Up Now/Learn More. Clicking on the latter response will take the volunteer to the event calendar where he or she can see time slots and job responsibilities to help in making a choice.
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The application tracks volunteer sign-ups so that you always know the status of your volunteer recruitment and so that future potential volunteers always know which volunteer slots are still open.
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The program sends out automated reminder emails to those who have signed up to be volunteers so that you don’t have to worry anymore about playing phone tag or dealing with email clutter.
Have you used VolunteerSpot.com? If so, please share your experiences with us by posting a comment, including what you love about it and what you would change.
Hi Carrie,
Thanks for the shout for VolunteerSpot! We’ve been simplifying volunteer coordiantion for several race support teams, community sports tournaments, festivals, fundraisers and more.
Just wanted you to know we’ve recently added a new feature making it super easy to recruit volunteers. Now volunteer leaders can put out the call for help in three ways:
1) Cutting/pasting email addresses (as you mentioned)
2) Creating a URL link to paste in a message to a group email or listserve (e.g. Yahoo!Groups) or on a FaceBook page
3) Generating a HTML ‘Sign Up Now’ button to post on your website — or, if a public event, on Craigslist.
We look forward to supporting your readers’ good work and are continually improving our site and adding features based on customer feedback.
Thanks!
I signed to help at a water table for the AT& T Marathon last month using Volunteer Spot. It was so easy – not like the year before that sent a week’s worth of reply-all email to my inbox. Now I’m using them for little league concession stands — every parent needs to cover a shift during the season. It’s a cool website.
Karen, thank you so much for pointing out these extra features on Volunteer Spot — they sound great! And Scott, thanks so much for sharing your experiences using Volunteer Spot. It’s great to hear that you’ve benefited from it both as a volunteer and as an event planner!
Take care,
Carrie