<html><head></head><body>Have you looked at <a href="http://calendartree.com">calendartree.com</a> ?<br>
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Just a thought.<br>
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Roger<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 6 June 2014 21:36:34 CEST, Nigel Metheringham <nigel@dotdot.it> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<pre class="k9mail">I'm looking for a good mechanism to co-ordinate volunteer allocation. <br />This email has a fairly long and hopefully complete description of what <br />we want to do - would like suggestions of appropriate solutions.<br /><br />TL;DR summary. I want to email a set of people a list of options, and <br />collect responses back into a spreadsheet grid with options on one axis <br />and people on the other showing which people can do each option.<br /><br />Longer version<br /><br />JR Theatre in York has a set of events that need Stewards to man <br />(person?) them. You would typically have 1 or possibly two events on a <br />date (ie 2 performances on a Saturday) - events are relatively sparse, <br />so not every date within a period.<br /><br />Each performance that needs manning has a date with day of the week, a <br />time and a title. This could be presented as either a list of <br />performances or maybe a calendar grid with one or two events on a date
<br />square.<br /><br />We have of the order of 100 Stewards; and we tend to allocate around 3 <br />months of events at a time - this would be maybe 20 to 70 performances.<br /><br />In the old days we mailed each volunteer a form with a list of <br />performances and a tick box for each one. The forms were collected back <br />and some poor person collated all the information. This was laborious <br />and expensive (postage).<br /><br />Currently we email this info out, but the information tends to come back <br />in several forms and piecemeal, so collating it into a spreadsheet form <br />to allow easy allocation is laborious (and error prone).<br /><br />So we would like to get a mechanism to automate the collection of this <br />info, in a way that is usable to an audience of relatively non-tech <br />savvy people.<br /><br />I have all the info already in place that I can generate a list of <br />performances in any appropriate format (the website info is already <br
/>generated off a database).<br /><br />We also use MailChimp so can send mails out that way - potentially <br />including a recipient identifier if we wanted to be clever about it.<br /><br />I have looked at Doodle ( <a href="http://doodle.com">http://doodle.com</a>/ ) - which would sort of do <br />the job if we used a free text options list, except:-<br /> 1. It arranges options in a horizontal list - this will work<br /> poorly for a list of potentially a 100 performances<br /><br /> 2. There is no import ability for options, so you would have<br /> to copy/paste 100 separate entries - the person doing this<br /> would soon want to kill me!<br /><br />We have a lot of our information in a google apps set of accounts, so we <br />are aiming to end up with our sheet of people vs performances as a <br />google spreadsheet - so one potential option is a way to generate google <br />forms in a relatively quick way.<br /><br />So in summary, for each person, we are
interested in a set of yes/no <br />(checkbox) answers for a long list of options, we also need their name <br />or other identifier, and maybe a free text field just to add comments <br />(ie can do any of these, but don't allocate me to more than 1 in a week).<br /><br />So what good suggestions can you come up with - remembering the end <br />users are going to be relatively naive.<br /><br /> Nigel.</pre></blockquote></div></body></html>