For our purposes of putting on a large cultural and music festival, we could not ask for a better software. Here are our favorite functions:
- Teams: we have thousands of shifts needing filled over the course of four days. Many of our volunteers sign up as teams (with their spouse, with their coworkers, etc.). This is the only software I've encountered where you can sign up an individual with multiple teams.
- Easy sign-up: our volunteers were able to easily sign up for their shifts
- Easy import: it was very easy to get our data imported from our previous system, and we have a lot of options to import large swaths of new data as needed
- Tiered permissions: there are three types of Users in Get Connected - the User (a shift volunteer; we have approximately 4,000 in our database), the Program Manager (one of our leadership volunteers who leads a specific department and does not need administrative access to the entire database; we have approximately 400 in our database), and a Site manager (has full administrative access to the site; we have approximately 10 in our database).
- Scheduling: because we have such a large number of volunteers, we need to have all of our schedules in one place. This is so helpful for our administrative and reception volunteers to be able to look someone up, regardless of their area, and tell them their schedule, as well as walk the user through the process of using their profile
- Database management: both of these functions are extremely smooth and streamlined; I love being able to filter the lists of people down for my specific needs
- Email & text blast: the ability to communicate with our volunteers through these functions is amazing! We opted to get rid of our newsletter software subscription and use the email blast. This makes our lives easier because we don't have to upload contacts to the newsletter site and be worried we missed someone. The text blast is great as well - we use it as a means to communicate to our leadership team for emergencies, but it would be a great tool to text your volunteers to remind them of their upcoming shift. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
This is a hard question - there is very little I dislike! If anything there are just some small nit-picky things that are not deal breakers:
- Cannot duplicate a custom shift opportunity: to be clear, it is possible to duplicate other types of opportunities; it is only a challenge because we almost exclusively use custom shifts and those cannot be duplicated (for instance, we have four bar opportunities and they are all open at the same time - 4-8pm, 8pm-12am, etc. - but we have to input these shift times four separate times for the four bars).
- Events RSVP: you cannot make events with a specific list of attendees. Instead, any event will be open for any user to register. This is not helpful if you have a private event, and you want to track attendees and email them. You would have to use a third party software (i.e. evite, greenvelope, etc.) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
