Reaching Volunteering Goals is our second workshop in the Reaching Goals, a Habitat for Humanity Peer Learning Workshop series presented by Giveffect, all-in-one software for Habitat for Humanity. The goal of this peer workshop series is to provide actionable steps to reach volunteering and community engagement goals that can be replicated by other Habitat for Humanity Affiliates.
Volunteers are the heart of Habitat for Humanity. Affiliates of all sizes rely on volunteers in a variety of ways from construction to ReStore.
In this workshop, Habitat for Humanity Volunteering and Community Engagement leaders Felicia Alingu, Director of Community Impact for Habitat for Humanity of NW Metro Atlanta, and Stacie Schirk, Community Engagement Manager of Habitat for Humanity Kansas City, shared first-hand how they achieved their volunteering and community engagement goals with specific initiatives and how you can too.
Many successful and growing Habitat Affiliates use Giveffect for volunteer management, fundraising, marketing, grants and more. Save time and attract, onboard and manage your construction and ReStore volunteers with one nonprofit software solution.
In this peer volunteering workshop, we’ll cover:
- 2022 Achievements and key learnings
- The step-by-step process for developing and executing initiatives
- 2023 Fundraising goals and their plan to reach goals this year
- Q&A
Volunteering: School Group Reservations
Presented by Felicia Alingu, tor of Community Impact for Habitat for Humanity of NW Metro Atlanta
Every year we partner with the Cobb High School Coalition to raise money to build one home. This is a group of public high schools, each with a habitat campus chapter. A faculty adviser manages each chapter, and the students who raise the most money get to participate in the construction.
Snapshot of Volunteer Group Reservation Success!
188 Volunteer spots
1,192.74 Volunteer hours recorded
157 Reservations confirmed
95% of assigned hours were completed
Here’s the play-by-play for how we achieved group volunteer reservation success:
1. Volunteer Campaign
We created a volunteer campaign for each house build. Using the campaigns was ideal because you can allow participants to volunteer and donate from the same page. And the donations can be attributed to the sponsor of that particular build. So you won’t have to do a lot of tracking to find out who gave what donation to what group.
You can also include sponsor Logos on the page, the location of the build with the Google maps link, details of the future homeowner, and general information about your organization. The campaign page is one page for everything, and that made it simple, for most of the volunteers
2. Volunteer Campaign Management
Within each campaign, we had a series of volunteer jobs, so the jobs for us refer to the volunteer group that is participating. The jobs can be password protected so that only people in that group can sign up.
And then within each job, we have volunteer shifts for each build day that the group is participating in. This has been a major win because volunteers can sign up for multiple shifts in one setting versus having to sign up for different shifts from different pages. So we like that a lot
3. Volunteer Reservations
Step 3 was to create the reservations for the high schools. And I’ll be honest, this part was a little bit tedious at first because there were four high schools participating in six build days.
Each school needed a separate reservation for each build day. So that’s 24 separate reservations. You can see on the screenshot, each reservation has a contact person who manages the list, and those are the school advisors. The group name is the name of each high school, and the reservation is attached to a volunteer job within the campaign
4. Reservation Links
We emailed the advisors a link to each reservation. In the email, we included some screenshots explaining how to do it. At the time, there was no way to automatically notify the reservation contact. The advisor would have to come back to this email every time they wanted to manage the reservation, so that part of the process was not ideal, and it was something I brought up during one of our check-in meetings with our account manager at Giveffect and I think that was Jack at the time.
Lo and behold! A few months later, they did implement a method that allows the constituent to create their own group reservation, and the system sends the contact and email with the link for them to manage their own invitations.
So now we just share a link to the campaign page, and the advisors can click group reservation and determine the number of spots that they want to create on their own, which is another huge time saver for our volunteer coordinator.
5. New Volunteer Giveffect Features
Faculty advisors can now create the number of spots that they need, which was a big thing for us, because the high schools, based on the amount of money they raised, would determine how many spots each school got.
And in addition to having the students participate, they would also have a teacher come to the build on one day, or maybe somebody from the yearbook to take pictures. So, sometimes you would need, seven spots. And sometimes you need 10 spots. This is a way for them to manage that themselves versus us, having to communicate with them every time when a change has to be made.
6. Meaningful Links
We have a WordPress website, and we use the plugin that’s called BetterLinks, which helps us to create shorter, meaningful links that we can share with the school adviser so that they can have easy access to that campaign page in a way that they can easily remember. And hopefully, that will lead to better performance for the online registration as well.
7. Monitoring Invitations
Our school advisors, like, I said, can manage their invitations independently, and they can see which students have registered, which students have declined, and which ones have not responded.
Again, this reduces the number of emails and phone calls we get from the advisor asking about how many students they have on their list and requesting to switch one student from another because of scheduling conflicts.
So this was a really key part of the system.
8. Monitoring Volunteer Invitations
The build day finally arrives. We’re all excited, and we have an iPad on the site to use Giveffect’s Event Buddy app to track actual participation.
It’s very simple because you select the campaign, and it will pull up the roster for today’s date automatically, so we usually have a volunteer at the check-in desk on our build days, and they don’t have to do too much searching to find the correct list. They just find the volunteer’s name, and they hit the orange button to check-in.
9. Easy Volunteering Reporting
Checking in and out on-site calculates the volunteer hours within Giveffect automatically. So it makes reporting so much easier.
And anyone out there who does the Affiliate Statistical Report for HFHI, you know you have to report the number of volunteers and the number of volunteer hours for a specific time period. Or if you’re out there doing the quarterly reports for Americorps, that’s another situation where you have to report these numbers.
Instead of having to download the excel sheet and do the calculations yourself, you can add the criteria that you need in the advanced search, and the system will display all the totals that you need.
For this example, I simply searched for all the group reservation names containing the words “High School” within our campaign from last year, and that is how I was able to determine that 157 students participated for those 1,192 hours and all in all.
Volunteer Achievements
This process helped us communicate more effectively with our high school habitat, and chapter advisors and led to a positive volunteer experience with less time and less labor from our volunteer coordinator and from myself.
As I mentioned earlier, it’s very important for us to know what the staffing is for a volunteer build day, especially a day where we’re using fewer power tools, because we have student volunteers that are under 18. If we have too few volunteers, we won’t get everything done. Our construction staff is going to be mad at us because the house won’t be ready for the next inspection and construction could potentially be delayed.
We don’t want that to happen, and Giveffect Volunteer Management has been an important tool to make sure everyone involved has the essential information.
Looking ahead to the future
I hope that we can get our Volunteer House leaders to create their own group reservations in the Giveffect system for the construction crew. Now they’re a bit of a different demographic and potentially less tech-savvy. So we’re working up to that for them. Right now, we are creating those reservations for them, so that they can enter the construction crew into the list.
We also want to explore using the online consent form for minors, which is when you edit a job, you can see the consent form and the minor waiver. Especially for the high school build, where we have a lot of minors participating right now.
We do require them to bring a paper copy of their parent permission form. But we’re hoping that this feature will help us reduce the amount of paperwork that we’re having to store.
So that is our story of how we had a lot of success with the Giveffect system in our Cobb High School Coalition Build, and we’re hoping that it continues.
Volunteering: Team Build Days
Presented by Stacie Schirk, Community Engagement Manager of Habitat for Humanity Kansas City
I want to talk to you a little bit about what our Team Build days look like, the successes that we’ve had in 2022, and what we’re hoping to have for 2023. In 2022 we successfully had over or had 123 sponsored bill days.
Sponsor Build Days are when an organization or community partner provides a monetary donation that goes directly towards building affordable housing solutions for Kansas City families. They bring out volunteers from their organization to have a build day on our construction sites.
We do that throughout the year, but we also have a two-week initiative called Women Build. A lot of affiliates do this in the month of May. We used to only have it for one week, but we it has been so popular that we expanded it to two weeks. And, we consistently sell out all of our build sites for Women Build.
Snapshot of Team Build Days Success
123 Sponsored Build Days
386 Successfully managed volunteers over two weeks of Women Build
Sold Out! Women Build: 2 weeks, 4 build sites, 5 days per week
Here’s the play-by-play for how we achieved Team Build Days Success!
1. Create the Volunteer Campaign
How we manage that successful initiative for those two weeks and our Team Builds throughout the year is using the tools in Giveffect, like the campaign page feature.
We have two main campaign pages, one specific to all of our general construction volunteers, where we link all of the Team Build opportunities outside of our specific initiatives. Those campaign pages really are beneficial because we create the shifts that all link to these campaigns. The specific private reservations go directly to an individual or an organization’s campaign or team.
And those campaign pages are really great because they do provide useful information, specific to what it looks like to be a volunteer on our general construction sites. It also shares what is Women Build specifically, what are we trying to achieve, and what is our success. It shows the volunteers that we have and the funds that we’ve raised.
2. Volunteer Webform
We use the reservation setting which makes managing Team Build so easy, not just for us internally, but for the organizations that bring in volunteers.
We use the web form feature for both surveys and for embedding questions into our volunteer application to waiver, and then we do surveys at the end to really gauge what our volunteer experience was like.
What we do is we create the web form in Givffect and it’s embedded into our website. We use this link so interested organizations can go on to our website and fill out this form letting us know that they’re interested. It comes directly to our inbox, where we can reach out to them and discuss opportunities for Sponsored Build Days.
3. Volunteer Reservation Links
Once we have an organization scheduled, and they’ve committed to a Sponsored Build Day, we use the reservation tool where we create a private shift. Then we link that to a specific reservation that is specific to this organization.
We use that link and send a personal email to their main point of contact, and it allows them to really manage their volunteers. They can put their names and email addresses in and send them the invite to fill out the volunteer application and waiver. They can also track and monitor the fulfillment of their volunteers.
So it does cut back on the constant emails that we’re having to send out and questions such as: Did I get all the volunteers in? Are they all signed up? Has everyone completed the waiver? It really is a great tool.
We have created our volunteer application and waiver to have everything in it to where we’re completely paper with paperless. So a volunteer can go on their phone or their laptop or their computer at work and fill up the volunteer application and waiver, and all the information that we need is automatically on their profile and give effect, and it confirms them for their volunteer day.
4. Form Questions
We build form questions into that volunteer application and waiver, and this really allows us to get all the necessary information that we need for each of our volunteers, whether it be dietary restrictions, t-shirt, size, gender race, anything that we want to know about our volunteers and for our specific Team Build Days with those are sponsored Build Days. We provide lunch and t-shirts for each of our volunteers.
We’re able to use the information that they put in their form or in their application. Their dietary restrictions, for instance, and order lunch to meet their needs t-shirt sizes. We provide t-shirts for all of our volunteers on our Team Build Days. This allows us to have all that information, and it lives right there on their profile.
We’re really able to gather all the data that we want and need for each of our volunteers to provide a better volunteer experience, but then also better communication with them.
Volunteering and Community Engagement Achievements
And so what are all our achievements? Having this very clean way of organizing our sponsored build days and our volunteers, the communication that we can provide to them, and getting their volunteers signed up very efficiently creates a positive volunteer experience all the way around. It also allows us to really have a high fulfillment rate on our construction sites.
We manage or track our fulfillment rate basically by asking our construction team: What are your needs? How many volunteers do you want out per day per week per month?
And then we use that as the basis for the number of volunteers that we have out, and how we get our fulfillment rate.
At Habitat Kansas City, we are consistently about 70% or above for our volunteer fulfillment rate. We really think that it is possible, because of the ease that we have using Giveffect in managing our volunteers. Giveffect really does allow us to provide positive, clear, and concise communication to our volunteers.
We use the SMS texting feature, and Giveffect if we need to communicate on the day of if there’s been rain to let them know. For example: Hey, the sites are muddy. Please prepare for that. Or if we have to cancel volunteers because of weather changes. Or if we have to move sites based on a change in our construction scheduling, we can use that text feature. Also, an email feature where we can go into everyone in that reservation and email all of them directly through Giveffect. It allows us to really save time internally, and also provide updated and timely information.
Then, in the end, we know that we can create a positive volunteer experience. We use the web form feature to also create a survey for our volunteers, that we send out the day after their volunteer experience and thank them for coming out.
Also, we include that link in there for them to go in and complete a survey for us. And it’s a very short, simple survey. It’s two questions: Did you have a safe volunteer experience with safety a priority? What was your overall thought of your volunteer experience, and you can rank it one to five. We’re consistently in between that four and five average per month.
We know that a big part of that they are able to give us comments on what made their volunteer experience positive or not positive. And consistently, we’re told it’s the ease of volunteer management, the ease of signing up the ease of registering to volunteer the communication that they receive really creates a positive volunteer experience.
Key Learnings to Apply in 2023
So for 2023, we really hope to continue to have high fulfillment rates. And we want to engage additional partners to help us build capacity, and engage in additional sponsor organizations that want to come out and have a Sponsored Build Day. It allows us to consistently have enough volunteers on our construction sites, but also bring in the necessary funding to continue moving our mission forward.
We also have really found Giveffect to be a useful resource, facilitating our volunteers, donors, and communication, using all the tools that I discussed earlier.
We’ve also really started to use the data that we’ve collected, and that lives and Giveffect on our donor and volunteer profiles as necessary information, and trying to figure out how we can convert those volunteers to donors.
We have recently used an outside third-party organization to help us build a survey where we survey through emails to Giveffect our volunteer contacts and ask them specific questions on really what they want from us, what they want to know from us? How do they want to be communicated with?
And we’re using that information to streamline our communication with them and give them the information that that they’re asking for and that’s fine.
Interested in learning about how Giveffect can help you can reach your volunteer management goals? Schedule a demo today!
