It was easier back in preschool. Parents marched in, dropped off the kids, and marched out – but first, everyone had to pass the same bulletin board. Everyone had to see the same paper announcements. Everyone saw the same paper sign-up sheets for activities and potlucks and fundraisers physically stapled to the cork, a pencil dangling by a string next to it. Yes, simpler times.
Once kids hit elementary school, parents hardly darken the school doorstep. No one passes by the same bulletin board every day, let me assure you. So how can you reach out to potential volunteers and tell them to help out at the fracking bake sale already? Oh, you can send home paper flyers, but we know how efficient that is. Five people sign up to bring brownies and no one signs up for cleanup.
There are many online volunteer sign-up solutions available. As a PTA volunteer coordinator this year, I’ve had success using Sign-Up Genius to get people to sign up for these sorts of activities. Many groups have been taking advantage of this for years – but your school is anything like mine, it can be a slow process to get out of paper’s cold grip.
Here’s why I like it:
It’s free. It’s paid for by advertising. (Like everything.) If you upgrade from their free Basic service to one of their Pro packages, you can eliminate the ads and can go up in volume. I can see how having multiple admins for one event would be useful, for example. Another Pro feature is limiting the signup dates.
But for most PTAs and other parent groups, the free service honestly should take care of most of your needs. (There is an interesting Payments feature for collecting donations and payments as long as you have a PayPal account – you can use this with the free basic service and they are very clear cut about the fees. I have not tried this feature yet but it looks promising.)
It’s simple and flexible. It’s easy to make myself an account to create sign-ups – I just needed an email address. More importantly, it allows volunteers to sign up online without having to create yet another account for something. Asking your volunteers to make a login id,choose a password, blah blah…it just gets in the way sometimes. I can mail the sign-up to an address book of volunteers directly from SignUp Genius, or I can just copy and paste the link and then send it out via our existing Yahoo group or post on our web site. It blends in with the tools we already have. Yet contact information for volunteers is still private and you can require further privacy features such as a special code.
Another flexible feature: Administrators can enter users directly onto an event sign-up themselves. This feature is huge for me, because at my school we are on the awkward edge between paper and electronic communication. Many families still lack regular internet access but still want to volunteer. Technology should not make barriers; I like that SignUp Genius acknowledges the fact that not everyone has email. If we still have to send out paper flyers, we at least have a common electronic sign-up to track the info.
That being said, there are a few tricks for building effective sign-ups I’ve discovered as I’ve gone along.
- As I said above, all you need is an email address to create a free Basic account and start making sign-ups. Whoever creates the sign-up is the administrator and can make changes, add names, and make other changes. With the Basic level you can have only one admin per sign up, but you can handle this in several ways. The chair of the event can create the sign-up and be the admin. Your volunteer coordinator can create and be in charge of the all sign ups. Ad if you are a terribly crafty PTA or PTO, you can make a new email handle just for making signups (ex. signups@whateverpta.org) (Got this trick from the SignUp Genius FAQs! Look under “Can I have more than one sign up administrator?”)
- Just choose one of their preexisting sign up themes and get it done. There is an option to upload your own image, but I would advise against it unless it’s crucially important. You may have to wait for your uploaded image to be approved before you can finish your signup.
- Most of the signups I’ve created use the One-Time option – good for one-day events such as bake sales. The Time Slots option is good for shifts on multiple days (think Book Fair). The Recurring option is good for “standing” events (something that happens every Monday, for example). Note that you can still add time slots after you complete your signup, but you can’t change a One-Time event to a Time Slots event. Think carefully about your volunteer needs before you choose one of the options.
- The Settings tab is where you choose what info you need to collect from your volunteers – name, email, and/or phone. You can set your notification preferences for you as the admin and for your signupees (Signupppers? Let’s stick with volunteers.) Here too you can require your volunteers to leave a Comment. (Example: if you put down a slot for “Cookies” for your bake sale, the volunteer can put down what kind of cookie so you don’t end up with the aforementioned five pans of brownies.)
I find that the site in general has good help available, include FAQs and Webinars. There are also some general tips for nonprofits. I found this article on coordinating volunteers to be pretty useful. I plan on using Sign-Up Genius this spring for some more complex events: our Earth Day school grounds cleanup project, and International Night, perhaps the most glittering event on any school calendar. Have any SignUp Genius tips you’d like to share?
The Fearless Volunteer 