We're not so much using this system to garner volunteers as we are to keep track of the people who signed up for our Three for Me program and to track their hours.
We have well over 100 volunteers and most will never use any aspect of this program.
I would like the ability to enter volunteer hours manually. Such as, go to the volunteer name, enter hours, don't need an event or how they served it.
Also, to separate events from interests when it comes to entering time volunteered. i.e Now I have to include our Friday popcorn poppers as an event. This makes for a very long events list. We list every volunteer opportunity in the two schools we support, of which maybe eight are actual events.
I knew I forgot something before.... It would also be nice if the system would stop turning apostropes into question marks in the texts of the email messages sent through the system.
I'm going to echo Katydid's comment on another level of permissions.
The other thing I would like is a different way for the reminder emails to work. We've tried rewording the standard email a couple of times, but we just can't get what we like. We'd like to be able to include info about where you're supposed to go, who you're supposed to report to, etc., and the only way to do that is to have the software admin edit the reminder whenever you have something come up. So if you have more than one event on the same day, that doesn't work.
It would be better if we could somehow have the event chairperson customize their event's reminder email. We're jury-rigging it now so that we just don't use the system reminders; the event chair has to remember a few days in advance to go ahead and email all the people scheduled separately. Which does work, but we'd just prefer it be more automated.
Also, I have a lot of people in our system who never filled out an interest survey (or whatever you want to call it--one of those forms where they tell you what they want to volunteer for). I'd like to be able to email those people and attach the form and ask them to fill it out. So, for example, I need a way to search for the volunteers who have all the "interest" fields blank.
Finally, I'd like it if I could have a little more flexibility on searching for volunteers. For example, let's say that I select all the volunteers who signed up to help with the book fair, and I sent them an email. But I didn't get enough help, so now I want to email everyone else. There's not a way for me to exclude all those people by saying pick all of these, but then exclude this group. There are a couple of other times where I've wanted to exclude certain groups of people, and there's no easy way to do it.
The ability to import data from excel is functional. We can import basic volunteer data like name, address, phone, email, etc. We can't import student info or interests.
If you are interested in importing your data, email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and we will send you the file structure for your data.
I absolutely agree with the Excel request. In fact in July when we first started with the program I was told that this was a feature that was going be available soon. Can you advise if this is going to happen?
My second suggestion: another level of permissions.
We have 10 board members and several committee chairs under each board member. We don't want to give that many people "Volunteer Chair" access because that level of access allows them to edit records.
We need a level that allows committee chairs to view volunteers and assign them to their projects and events without having full access to edit volunteer records.
