Volunteer System

The new Volunteer system is built to be a system that can be used for small to large races as a mechanism to coordinate all of the volunteer tasks. We have received design help from small races up to 22,000 person races, and will be particularly interesting to those races looking to move to a more modern solution that the old Do It Sports system that is so widely used by mid sized to large races.

The Volunteer System is a free service that any race can use, but we can only provide support to those races who are also using RunSignUp for registration.

Here is a quick video overview:

Tasks and Categories
The basic unit of work is called a Task – this is what a race needs volunteers for.  For example a water stop, or bib pickup, or packet assembly, or Expo workers.

Categories are a collection of Tasks – for example “Water Stops” Category includes the 5 different “Water Stop 1”, “Water Stop 2”, etc. Tasks.

Tasks have Information and Location fields where instructions to the volunteers can be kept. Note that Tasks can be made Private – this means they are not shown on the public page where Volunteers can sign up. This is useful if you have a group that is responsible for a Task or Category. For example Boy Scout Troop 23 will be responsible for Water Stop 2 and they will take care of having the volunteers there.

A Task Coordinator is someone who is assigned as the leader for this Task. They will be able to see all of the Volunteers on this task. They can also Import Volunteers as well as send emails to their Volunteers.

When a Task Coordinator is added in the page above, they receive an email notification and a link to sign up in the system so they can see their volunteers and do imports. In the above example, the Troop Leader could be invited as the Coordinator for Water Stop 2. Then he could add all the Troop members.

Note that Categories can also have Coordinators. This gives you a way to have a hierarchy of people – with someone responsible for all the Water Stops and Individual Water Stop Coordinators.

Task Timeslots can be added to any Task. In addition, you can make note of Task Resources needed.

Categories are easily created by selecting a set of Tasks. A Task can only be part of one Category. As noted earlier, you can have Category Coordinators. When you enter a name and email, that person is invited via email.  Once they login or create an account they can see the information related to that Category and Tasks and import volunteers and communicate with them.

Custom Questions
The Volunteer System uses the same custom question subsystem as the regular registration system.  This is very powerful with features like formatting, validation, required responses, per-task questions and question logic. You can read more on our question system here.

Volunteer Import
You can import volunteers very simply with an online form, and you can import volunteers.

Reporting
The Volunteer Report has a number of options:

• List of all volunteers with sortable fields – just click on the column heading and the list is sorted lightning quick.
• Summary with number of volunteers with quick Red/Yellow/Green highlights to let you know which tasks have reached their appropriate levels.
• Search for volunteers
• Per Task Reports
• Print
• Download CSV for Excel and Google Sheets analysis and reporting

Communication

Volunteer Managers and Coordinators are able to communicate with Volunteers easily with the built-in email notification tool.

To learn more, see the detailed blog entry here.