Volunteer Management: 5 must-have features
What are the must have’s when looking at volunteer management systems (VMS)? Below we outline 5 features of volunteer management systems that can take your volunteer program to the next level.
A Volunteer Hub
Lots of people want to volunteer in their community. But it can be hard to find reputable nonprofits without knowing their names. Volunteers can get frustrated searching through Google results or playing phone tag with volunteer coordinators to figure out how and when they can get involved.
Having a volunteer hub that lists your organization’s contact information, mission, the causes you support, all of your upcoming volunteer events, a donation button, and your in-kind needs can help current and potential volunteers get involved.
Ensure your all-in-one page, and volunteer hub is super easy to create and edit. For example, can you drop in essentials like: a logo, your contact info, the causes you support, and a couple of paragraphs about your organization and mission. Any time you create and post an event on does it automatically show up on your volunteer hub page. If you want to save even more time, does it, or can it integrate with your website?
Volunteer Profiles
Whether you have 10 volunteers or 1000, sometimes it can be tough to remember things about your volunteers. When you have a volunteer profile, you can easily see how many hours a volunteer has served, their picture, and their about section. No more forgetting names!
Profiles for your volunteers can showcases their history of involvement with your organization, their contact info, attendance rate, total hours, donation history, which events they’ve gone to, and the causes they support. Keeping track of their activity also shows you any groups you’ve assigned them to, and which of your programs they’re involved with.
One really great way to keep volunteers coming back is to show that your organization knows and appreciates them. Ever met a volunteer who was really great at a certain task? Or who mentioned an area of expertise that might be useful to your nonprofit? Add a note on their volunteer profile to remind yourself! You can also use notes to keep track of any training or forms volunteers have completed.
Group Management
Volunteer coordinators tell us that group management is one of their biggest time sinks. Your volunteer management system should include ways to manage groups of volunteers. You can use groups to create private events, email certain volunteers, create group-specific data reports, and tag volunteers. You can even use group functions to specify things like ‘Background-checked Volunteers’ or ‘Local High School Students’.
Group management can also help to grow partnerships! Collaborative partnerships with companies have mutual benefits. Not only do you get to know talented people who can be general volunteers or who can volunteer their professional skills to help your organization when needed. But you also establish a partnership that could lead to more corporate donor funding or in-kind sponsorships for your nonprofit. And the company benefits from a stronger social impact or CSR (corporate social responsibility) program that is attractive to potential hires, improve its image in the community as a business that cares, and they keep its employees engaged and happy.
Private Events
Don’t forget to engage even your seasoned volunteers! Having them sign up for private events is very important. A private event means that only certain volunteers will have access to it. Usually, this would be your regular volunteers or a specific group like a corporate partner. Private events
Statistics and Reporting
Wouldn’t it be great if you had access to automatic and easy-to-read statistical reports on your volunteer’s impact on your organization? Think you don’t need stats? Think again! Reports can include exactly the information grantmakers and big donors loveeee to see. Attach reports to grant applications to give reviewers a comprehensive look at your volunteer program. Or send them to donors so they can see the impact your activities have. Plus, having a volunteer management system that gives you a clean report of demographics and automatically calculated hours makes it really easy to share with your board and other team members.
Some of the more important data you will want include:
Volunteers:
It’s always helpful to know how many people have gotten involved with your nonprofit, including the total number of volunteers, total volunteered hours right, the percentage of active volunteers, and if at all possible the economic impact of hours worked by your volunteers. This arms you with quantitative data that’s perfect to have on hand for funders, grant organizations, or local governments.
Events and attendance rates:
Easily see how many events volunteers have attended for your organization and get a breakdown of attendance rates. It’s even better if you can get event attendance activity over time so that you can see when volunteers are more active with your events and take note if certain times of year differ in the attendance/no-show rates. Not to brag, but nonprofits that use POINT see great attendance rates – our average attendance across posted events is 97% 🤗
Want to see how POINT can level up your volunteer program? We would love to show you!
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