[Wylug-help] Managing volunteer organisation online...

[Nigel Metheringham]

I'm looking for a good mechanism to co-ordinate volunteer allocation. 
This email has a fairly long and hopefully complete description of what 
we want to do - would like suggestions of appropriate solutions.

TL;DR summary. I want to email a set of people a list of options, and 
collect responses back into a spreadsheet grid with options on one axis 
and people on the other showing which people can do each option.

Longer version

JR Theatre in York has a set of events that need Stewards to man 
(person?) them.  You would typically have 1 or possibly two events on a 
date (ie 2 performances on a Saturday) - events are relatively sparse, 
so not every date within a period.

Each performance that needs manning has a date with day of the week, a 
time and a title.  This could be presented as either a list of 
performances or maybe a calendar grid with one or two events on a date 
square.

We have of the order of 100 Stewards; and we tend to allocate around 3 
months of events at a time - this would be maybe 20 to 70 performances.

In the old days we mailed each volunteer a form with a list of 
performances and a tick box for each one.  The forms were collected back 
and some poor person collated all the information.  This was laborious 
and expensive (postage).

Currently we email this info out, but the information tends to come back 
in several forms and piecemeal, so collating it into a spreadsheet form 
to allow easy allocation is laborious (and error prone).

So we would like to get a mechanism to automate the collection of this 
info, in a way that is usable to an audience of relatively non-tech 
savvy people.

I have all the info already in place that I can generate a list of 
performances in any appropriate format (the website info is already 
generated off a database).

We also use MailChimp so can send mails out that way - potentially 
including a recipient identifier if we wanted to be clever about it.

I have looked at Doodle ( http://doodle.com/ ) - which would sort of do 
the job if we used a free text options list, except:-
   1. It arranges options in a horizontal list - this will work
      poorly for a list of potentially a 100 performances

   2. There is no import ability for options, so you would have
      to copy/paste 100 separate entries - the person doing this
      would soon want to kill me!

We have a lot of our information in a google apps set of accounts, so we 
are aiming to end up with our sheet of people vs performances as a 
google spreadsheet - so one potential option is a way to generate google 
forms in a relatively quick way.

So in summary, for each person, we are interested in a set of yes/no 
(checkbox) answers for a long list of options, we also need their name 
or other identifier, and maybe a free text field just to add comments 
(ie can do any of these, but don't allocate me to more than 1 in a week).

So what good suggestions can you come up with - remembering the end 
users are going to be relatively naive.

	Nigel.
-- 
[ Nigel Metheringham ------------------------------ nigel at dotdot.it ]
[                 Ellipsis Intangible Technologies                  ]