What Can Volunteer Management Software Help You With?

Being a volunteer manager is not at all an easy task. You are most likely clogged with activities like planning events, promoting your event, organizing schedules, communicating effectively, volunteer time tracking, and much more.

There is no saying how much time you have to spend in a day to do all of that effectively, and by the end of it, you must be tired. However, volunteer recruitment, retention, and engagement are your main job role, but with so many predispositions, you hardly find time to cater to it.

Luckily, there are many programs for volunteer management you can turn to, making the task a lot easier and less time-consuming. These apps for volunteer management can help organizations streamline the entire functions of a volunteer program within a single platform.

With this protected database of all your volunteer information, you can easily recruit, schedule, and engage with the volunteers better. With a volunteer management program, the manager can track:

·        Event check-in

·        Volunteer Registration

·        Shift schedules

·        Hours served

·        Impact reports

·        Opportunity promotion tools

·        Liability waivers

With all that being automated, you can not only save a lot of time but also ensure better communication with your team and be more organised. With the rampant digitisation of this industry, most volunteers are now looking for opportunities online. That eventually makes such a program a must for any organisation that wants to efficiently reach interested volunteers in the community.

Why Might You Consider Implementing A Volunteer Management Program?

Now that you know how a volunteer management program works and helps your organisation, you might be contemplating implementing one. While you might believe in using software for a more service-focused effort, you might not understand the best time to use one. This can be quite a costly mistake. Further mentioned here are the top three instances that tell you now is the time.

1.      You Cannot Focus On The Other Important Tasks:

One common complaint that any non-profit professional will always have is the dearth of time. Managing such a vast list of data can lead you to not have any time to finish the more important tasks assigned to you.

With such a program, you can overcome that program once and for all. With it, you can easily generate detailed reports, segregate all volunteers based on their availability, and even organise all their shifts in a calendar. Mentioned here are some additional things you can get help with.

·        Quarterly and Annual Reports:

By choosing the software solution over spreadsheets, any manager will easily be able to organise, access and export real-time data. You can also use the data to make more well-informed decisions.

·        Record Keeping:

A volunteer management program can also allow all your volunteers to enter their own information. This means you will not have to sit and type down their contact info, interests or skills one by one. All of this will be done at once during the time of registration and check-in.

·        Targeted Communication:

With certain automated features that these programs offer, managers can easily filter out their volunteers based on various classifications. This can allow them to send targeted messages about events and opportunities much faster. Targeted communication is, after all, the key to volunteer retention.

2.      You Want To Increase Volunteer Impact With Data Reporting:

It is very important that volunteer managers accurately present their program impact to the board of directors, their financial supporters and the communities. However, quite often, quantifying the impact can be rather difficult.

This is another instance in which implementing a volunteer management program can help. It will help you curate and deliver the entire program's impact in a much more descriptive and holistic manner. The program will track your organisation's volunteer life cycle automatically.

If you understand your volunteer and program impact with real-time and accurate reports, you can easily:

·        Change and better your community services and programs

·        Show gratitude and reward your volunteers better

·        Engage more stakeholders by increasing efficiency

·        Focus on getting more funding and winning more grants

This will further help you understand the total number of volunteers it has and how many hours each served. A good program can also find the volunteer impact valueand skillsshared.With this data, your organisation can then assess the program it is making on its cause or how effective the community programs are.

3.      You Want Automated Volunteer Engagement

Volunteer engagement can be a rather cumbersome and time-consuming task when your entire program data gets stored in multiple systems. Instead of wasting time tracking each of your volunteers' contact numbers and calling them, you can just use the software to do it.

Volunteer engagement is perhaps one of the most important and significant reasons why professionals turn to volunteer management software. It can help you send bulk texts and emails to each volunteer. However, you must make sure that the software you choose has the necessary communication features.

Some important ones include the ability to segregate your volunteer list based on their availability, interests, credentials and skills. This way, you can make the experience more personable and engaging. Here are some other software automation features that can help you:

·     Communicate With Them In Real-Time:

Many such software comes with their own app for text messaging. This allows you to not only store all your communication with respective volunteers in one place but also talk to them live.

·        Send Email Invites:

In addition to being able to send your volunteers send personalised invites for specific volunteers, you can also use the online volunteer scheduling to book them based on their availability.

·        Send Your Volunteers Notifications:

By sending personalised notifications at the right time, you can ensure that your volunteers know all the available events and opportunities available. You can also thank them for their time, and with consistent notifications and communication, you will increase engagement.

How Should You Go About Choosing The Best Software?

These are three of the several instances when using a volunteer management program becomes absolutely necessary. However, now that you have decided to purchase one such program, you need to know how you should go about the selection process.

One quick search on the internet can present you with a long list of options to choose from. While having numerous options is a good thing, it can often overwhelm a first-time user. Fortunately, there are some basic things you can ensure to make a more suitable choice.

You should always try and choose an all-in-one solution instead of different apps for each purpose. This will not only make it more effective for your organisation but also ensure better collaboration.

This way, you can easily build long-lasting volunteers with your supporters, track involvement more efficiently and also improve volunteer engagement. This way, you can retain more volunteers and develop more genuine relationships. Apart from this, some important features you should look for include:

·        It should have the ability to build individual volunteer profiles. This can help you track volunteers' personal preferences, history and individual impact.

·        You should be able to highlight all events, increase your volunteer attendance and promote opportunities within the engagement portal.

·        Having a free volunteer app can also really help you track volunteer hours and connect with them on the go.

·        Another feature you should look for is team engagement abilities. The software should effectively create groups, send join links, show team-specific information and assign team leaders.

·        Lastly, automation is key to regaining control of your time as the organisation's leader. The software should automatically send surveys, send emails to new volunteers and prompt check-ins.

With all the informationpresent in this article, you can easily make a much better choice when it comes to a volunteer management program. Rest assured, with capable software, you will make your non-profit a lot more efficient and effective.