2011′s Best Systems for Managing Volunteers

Volunteers are often the life blood of an organization and keeping track of all the important details needed to keep everyone productive and fulfilled.With the need to manage communication, coordinate schedules, and track hours, having a volunteer management system can be crucial to keeping you on track.

Idealware and Techsoup have released a report comparing several volunteer management systems.The report rates 3 Standalone systems and 3 Consolidated Systems on the basis of how good they were at executing certain tasks that are common in volunteer management.

Among the Standalones, eCoordinator  rises to the top and quickly sets itself apart from a few systems rise to the top as highest rated volunteer management systems. For the Standalone system, eCoordinator sets itself apart from Volgistics and Volunteer Reporter.  eCoordinator sets itself apart with an intuitive volunteer profile that volunteers can fill out an keep updated. They also have a robust email system that uses well designed templates, and allows you to personalize messages with mail merge function.

Consolidated Systems

Among the Consolidated systems, it was a little bit harder to identify which was the favorite. The biggest advantage among all of the consolidated systems that were reviewed, is that they make it easy to manage other constituent information. This is crucial because volunteers are very strong candidates for donors and vice versa. Having a system that can accommodate the overlap between volunteers and other influencers in your organization can be very useful.

To decide which Consolidated system you like best depends on the features that are most important to you. If tracking your volunteer’s activity is really important, you’ll want to go with Donor Perfect. It allows you to track many details about your volunteers, from their interests, to their weekly availability.

If scheduling is a really important part of your volunteer efforts, then you may want to consider Giftworks is a solid system. Its scheduling function makes it very easy to match the available jobs for volunteers with their available schedule. The choices that you make should ultimately be guided by the needs of your organization.

Where’s Salesforce?

It’s great to see all these volunteer management systems out there, but we wonder how Salesforce would have rated! Groundwire released the Volunteers for Salesforce App last month and it is proving to be a valuable tool for volunteer management on the powerful platform.

It enables you to track Volunteer Jobs under campaigns so that you can easily track which volunteers are doing which tasks in once central place.

It also makes it easy for you to optimize scheduling for volunteers with their “Volunteer Shifts” feature.  It tracks how volunteers are needed for events or projects, how many of the shifts you’ve filled, and how many are left to be filled. If logging hours is important, as is often the case with students, then the “Volunteer hours” tab makes it easy to track how long people have worked and to generate cumulative reports over a period of time. With the system being so new, it’s understandable why it didn’t make it into this year’s report, but we think it will measure up pretty well against the other volunteer management systems reviewed.

Regardless of which technology you go with, systems like these will help move your volunteer efforts forward in meaningful ways. It’s worth it to make the financial and time investment in any one of these systems because it will lead to more efficient staff, happier volunteers, and ultimately an organization more empowered to do good!

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