Volunteer Scheduling Tools & Tips
Saturday, April 23, 2011 at 11:47AM Canvassing - Yard Signs - Phone Banks - Poll Workers
Our call center activities over the years have included both paid and volunteer workers, in-person and online, in both business and political endeavors. Here are the scheduling tools and processes we have used, which have also been successfully applied to a variety of volunteer and shift work scheduling.
An awesome free tool is Doodle, which allows groups to be scheduled completely online. This works when a group is seeking a mutually agreeable meeting time, as well as for scheduling large groups for planned activities.
A more feature-rich system, suitable for almost any shift scheduling for pools of volunteers or employees, is Shiftboard. Their basic $50 monthly service is a fantastic way to manage and schedule a group of workers.
Set up your schedule in one of these systems, then distribute the invitation to volunteers far and wide through your website, email, and facebook.
Step 1 (apparently this process is in reverse chronological order) must be the calculation of how many person-hours are needed. As a rule of thumb, assume 50% turnout for volunteers.
Productivity varies widely depending on many factors, but for estimating purposes, think 20-30 dials per hour for a manual phone bank. Canvassers can knock on 10-15 doors per hour, and a two-person yard sign team can install about 10 per hour. If experience in your neighborhood or district is different, then, by all means, use your numbers. Build an Excel worksheet to calculate the number of person-hours, shifts, etc. Email us for examples from other projects.
The last month before an election is crunch time. Use these tools to get the most impact from those dedicated volunteers working on your campaign.
