At North Dallas Shared Ministries, we have over 150 volunteers each week that want to sign-up for service time slots so we can insure adequate staffing for all of our clients. We also want to track actual hours donated so we can report back in aggregate to their home congregations.
We’ve looked at free-to-nonprofit apps: SignUp, Doodle, CrewApp, WhenToHelp and paid apps: VolunteerHub and TrackItForward, but none of them is quite what we need. We currently use Charity Master for tracking, but it doesn’t do scheduling. I saw the similar post from October 2018 and wondered if anyone has new input.
Sadly nothing specific to offer here, but one of our clients has been facing similar challenges and last I knew they still hadn’t found a great solution. I can’t remember what all they’ve looked at, but if you want to talk with someone over there and compare notes, let me know. I can make an introduction.
We use Ministry Scheduler Pro. It allows for volunteers to request replacements, it schedules, I am not sure about tracking time since that is not something we do.
It looks like Planning Center could be really useful for worship
planning and scheduling but doesn’t appear to be quite what we are
looking for. We have 150-200 volunteers each week and want them to be
able to select their opportunities instead of the staff driving them.
Thanks for taking the time to respond, though. It was one more possibility.
If you are on Office 365, you may have an appropriate alternative already available. Microsoft’s Staff Hub, though not specifically for volunteers, is for scheduling shifts for workers and can handle small and large scale workforces. Staff Hub itself is being retired, but the functionality is being rolled into MS Teams.
We currently do not provide individual user accounts for many of our
volunteers, especially those who have more manual-focused jobs that
don’t require use of a computer. As a result, adding them to our AD
users and groups would be a significant support load for our extremely
lean (part-time, volunteer, on-site only one day a week) IT support. I
realize we’ll need accounts for whatever solution we decide on, but
would prefer one without the complexity of O365 thrown into the mix.
But we’ll keep it in mind. Thanks for the suggestion.