VolunteerBot

VolunteerBot is a system we have created with the aim of getting more of our club members to volunteer throughout the year.

We supply more than 70 volunteers to AV over the course of the year to keep the sport going and to avoid losing competition points. We also have a few events of our own that require volunteering. To make sure we’re giving everyone the opportunity to help out and to spread the workload we’ve created VolunteerBot to automate the process of finding volunteers.

Our membership base is now over 160 people which means that each member should only need to volunteer for one event each year to easily meet our volunteering duties.

How does it work?

• Upcoming volunteer events are created in a google calendar.
• For each event, VolunteerBot will email a small number of MUAC members every so often until the volunteer positions have been filled or every member has been contacted or we run out of time (in which case we will manually send a final plea to all members).
• The email’s include button’s so that people can respond straight away if they can/can’t make it and also includes a tally of volunteers for the season.

Selection criteria

When deciding who to contact the VolunteerBot uses the following selection criteria for each volunteer event:

• Start with a list of all current members for the season (i.e. 2017/2018)
• Sort by number of times each member has volunteered in the season (primary sort)
  • Sort by the last time we have contacted each member (secondary sort)
    • Sort by the total number of times each member has volunteered for all seasons (tertiary sort)

So, members with the lowest volunteer count for each season will be more likely to be contacted first for each event.

Why did we build this?

The last couple years we’ve been using a google spreadsheet to try and keep track of who volunteers and who we should approach based on the aim of getting more of our club members to volunteer throughout the year. This worked well, however using the spreadsheet is only valuable if we keep it up-to-date, which was proving a challenge. There’s also a lot of manual work in sending out emails. So we decided to automate this process.

Why not use a traditional Roster system?

We could create a roster at the start of each season and assign members to each event, but we feel like that this would be too rigid and still require a lot of manual effort. Circumstances will inevitably change and members assigned to particular events would likely need chasing up. The VolunteerBot is more dynamic and we can customise it as we go.