Austin
Diaper Bank
Connecting with Volunteers
Meet Heather
Heather Trent is the Program and Volunteer Manager at the Austin Diaper Bank. Since she started with the organization in 2018 she has worn many hats, including running social media, managing programming and expansion, as well as coordinating volunteers. So, she’s pretty dang busy. Luckily she’s a total extrovert and loves getting to interact with so many different people through her job! The diaper bank has about 100 individual volunteers each month, and Heather always looks forward to meeting new people and seeing her regular volunteers. But managing all these volunteers takes time and energy, especially if you don’t have the right tools.
"Personally, POINT has made my job easier and has given me back time I can use to get other tasks accomplished that I haven’t had the capacity to do before."
“Compared to Salesforce, POINT is extremely user friendly.”
Meet Austin Diaper Bank
Did you know that 1 in 3 families struggle to afford diapers and other basic needs? The Austin Diaper Bank supports 35,000 families across six counties in Central Texas with free diapers, wipes, and period supplies. They work with several partner agencies to distribute their donations to individuals and families, and in 2021 they were able to donate over 1.8 million diapers and menstrual supplies to their community! That means they made a looooot of moms and babies very happy.
Platforms like Salesforce weren’t built for nonprofits.
Before the pandemic, students from the University of Texas helped the Austin Diaper Bank setup Salesforce to use for volunteer signups. The team loved the website integration which made it easy to sign up, but during the pandemic, the diaper bank stopped allowing volunteers. They temporarily removed Salesforce from their site, but when they were ready to welcome back volunteers, the platform had changed and they couldn’t access the features they needed. This was a major challenge for Heather.
POINT is designed to support professionals
like Heather.
POINT is built specifically for nonprofit needs, and constantly seeks to improve features. Heather loves that she can bounce ideas around with the POINT team and get the ball rolling on features POINT can add that would make her life easier. Because POINT is dedicated to putting nonprofits first, Heather has access to a free volunteer software that works for her specific needs. POINT’s backend tools help her better manage and connect with volunteers, by enabling her to quickly see photos of people who have signed up and see how many spots are left to fill for each event. Heather also loves that she can see the total volunteers in their system, and use templates to easily create new dates for volunteer opportunities. Plus, it offers the same easy website integration for signups that her volunteers were used to.
“Our volunteers help us with big tasks like wrapping over 200,000 diapers each month, taking inventory of thousands of diapers and getting distributions ready for our community partners.
Our volunteers say POINT is easy to use and once they sign up for POINT, it’s even easier to sign up for the next opportunity.
Heather knows a great volunteer experience is
a game changer.
Making sure that volunteers can easily sign up for opportunities is key for Heather. Their volunteers have a huge impact on the organization – they wrap up over 200,000 diapers each month, inventory supplies, and get distributions ready for their community partners. This is an incredible benefit to the nonprofit and the community as a whole. Volunteers like that the app is easy to use to sign up for opportunities, and Heather loves the bright and colorful photos that go along with the volunteer opportunity postings, saying they set the tone for what it’s like to volunteer at the
diaper bank.
“Our wonderful volunteers come from all walks of life and have different reasons for wanting to spend their time with us. At the time this was written [February], we have had a total of $2,986 in economic impact from our volunteers in 2022. We can surmise that number will be about $35,000 for the year which is amazing!”
By saving time with
POINT, Heather forms
deeper connecting
with volunteers.
POINT saves Heather about 9 hours each month because now she has a platform that sends automatic confirmation, reminder, and thank you emails to her volunteers. Before switching to POINT, she had to send all of those emails manually. With that task taken care of automatically, she can do more of what she loves: spending more time with and getting to know her volunteers. Recently, she was even able to take the time to nominate a longtime volunteer for an award from Recognizing Good.
“Before using POINT, I spent a good amount of time confirming, reminding, and thanking each individual volunteer or group. As much as I liked keeping in touch with our amazing volunteers, it has been a huge time saver. Now that I have 9 extra hours a month, I spend more time with the volunteers.”
“The team at POINT has been fantastic to work with. When issues come up, they are fast to fix the problem. Anytime I have a question, they are quick to answer and are also open to adding more features in a very quick turnaround…even with a large network of users, I feel like we are a priority.”
