Manage Volunteers

Save Time and Trees with VolunteerLocal’s Online Waiver

Lucy Williams

VolunteerLocal DisclaimerWe love being able to save time for you and your organization. We also like saving trees. That’s why we have a section for Disclaimers, where you can upload your waiver, ensuring everyone who registers for your event has read and signed your waiver – minus the paperwork.

To set up your waiver, go to Events->Your Events, and select the Disclaimer link next to your event. Copy and paste your waiver into the text box. The checkbox underneath, “Check here to capture a digital signature to accept the disclaimer,” ensures that your volunteers are required to give a digital signature accepting your terms. You can customize the text displayed next to the confirmation checkbox in the section directly underneath.

For our Discover, Grow, & Conquer clients, we give you the option to set up a separate minor waiver for those volunteers under 18. Copy and paste your minor waiver in the portion beneath your adult waiver. You’ll notice that it prompts you to add a “birthdate” field to your registration questions. If you haven’t already done so (under Events->Your Events->Volunteer Information), adding a minor waiver will automatically do so for you. This means that when a volunteer enters a birthdate under 18 years of age, the separate minor waiver will appear on the page to be downloaded and signed by a parental guardian.

We know it’s important for you to keep your volunteers and your organization safe. Cover all your bases and ditch the paperwork with an online waiver.

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Reliving History at Living History Farms

Lucy Williams

 Living History Farms Whether or not you’re a history buff, at some point you’ve probably wondered what it would have been like if you had been born in another time period. But we’re here to tell you that that doesn’t have to be just a daydream. Recreating historical lifestyles is exactly what Living History Farms, an outdoor museum in Iowa, is doing. With live people and lots of land, they’re completely redefining the phrase “history repeats itself.”

Living History Farms’ own history started back in 1970. The 500-acre interactive museum is located in Urbandale, Iowa. Since it’s founding, it has worked to educate, entertain, and connect people of all ages to Midwestern rural life experiences. Using both staff members and volunteers, different time periods are recreated to demonstrate a variety of lived lifestyles from the year 1700 to present day. Within this huge outdoor museum, visitors can view an Ioway Indian Farm from 1700, an 1850 Pioneer Farm, a 1900 Horse-powered farm and a small rural town dated 1875.

“VolunteerLocal has been such a gift.”

In the year 2016, we know how important agriculture is. These recreations of the past are a powerful wayLiving History Farms to enrich public understanding and to engage conversation about the significance of past and present issues in agricultural and rural life. The Living History Farms offer a safe (and not to mention gorgeous) place for individuals, families, and groups from all over the world to view change through time.

For Jan Milroy, Manager of Volunteer Services at Living History Farms, there are a lot of favorite times to enjoy. “I love our historic special events, such as suffrage debates taken from real historical documents between two women. Or our recreation of an 1850 pioneer wedding, including a dance and a special cake! Halloween nights are also a special opportunity for families to trick-or-treat safely, and allows them to view our museum and enjoy our uniqueness.”

“I strongly recommend this to others. I’ll never go back to my old system.”

Living History FarmsBefore switching to VolunteerLocal, Living History Farms was using somewhat prehistoric methods for scheduling volunteers. “I was spending hours upon hours emailing or calling potential volunteers. Often we’d go back and forth and they might end up not getting the slot they wanted,” says Milroy. “Having VolunteerLocal allows potential volunteers to decide on their own, whenever they want and how they would like to participate.”

Don’t miss out on an opportunity to make a change and view changes in time. Sign up now to help with Halloween night!

Photos courtesy of Living History Farms

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Dress for Success: the Job You Want

kaylee@volunteerlocal.com
Photo cred: xfinity.com

Interviews can be scary. Even if your resume is polished, you’ve packed three clean notebooks (and four pens) in your binder, and you’ve recited how your-biggest-mistake-turned-into-a-learning-moment six times to your bathroom mirror–you’ll probably still wake up on the morning of the big day feeling about as under prepared as Ashlee Simpson on Saturday Night Live.

The only thing that could possibly add even more stress to that crucial juncture between the shower and the front door is putting together the perfect outfit.

You know what I’m talking about. That moment you open your closet doors only to realize the full extent of your impending fashion crisis. You were sure you had plenty of trendy fare in stock, but you were wrong. You’ve got nothing. No slacks, no blazers. You only have one pair of heels and they look like they belong to someone in the cast of Chicago. Huge hit on the dance floor, huge flop in the corner office.

Dress for Success Des Moines

Meet Jody White, one of the founding partners and the current Executive Director at Dress for Success Des Moines, a nonprofit that aims to promote the economic independence of disadvantaged women by providing professional attire, a network of support and the career development tools to help women thrive in work and in life.

Photo cred: businessrecord.com

Jody White is one of many in this business who believe that every woman deserves to own at least one professional outfit that makes her feel as fabulous as she looks. That’s why Dress for Success suits women applicants in business attire for free. Everything from blouses to heels to jewelry–even make-up application tutorials.

“When a client arrives in our office, she is given one-on-one attention,” says White. “She is our number one priority.”

But they don’t stop there. Dress for Success provides a six-week class in conjunction with the Going Places Network to help women craft resumes, write cover letters and learn to apply old skills to new jobs. “Even the suiting itself serves as a kind of interview prep,” says White. “If they arrive late, or even sometimes too early, we’ll tell them the interviewer won’t respond positively to that.”

Moving to an automated volunteer registration system was an easy transition for Dress for Success. “Having a tool, as basic as that sounds, just having a tool for volunteers to sign up for our upcoming orientations and events is so wonderful,” White says. “VolunteerLocal is super easy to use and compatible with other users–because we have three or four people managing the events at a time–and it’s consistent and helpful.”

Clients are accepted at Dress for Success on a referral basis by partner agencies, listed here. Look sharp, Des Moines–Dress for Success is in town, and they’re keeping it fashion-forward with a hip new volunteer management software, VolunteerLocal.

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The New Volunteers

kaylee@volunteerlocal.com
Photo cred: www.nonprofitaction.org

The first wave of baby boomers has turned 65–and it seems everybody wants their own little slice of the retirement party cake. The Economist might warn us that this could only entail (to drop the metaphor) an increasing financial strain on national programs like Medicare and Social Security. Luckily, I don’t really read The Economist, and I’m certainly not here to gripe about who gets the corner pieces with the most frosting. I’m here to talk about the unpaid work these aging boomers are undertaking: volunteer work. Even better, these retirees aren’t just any volunteers—they’re the only kind of unpaid work that could bring years of experience and technical training to the table. With passion and plenty of free time, boomer volunteers are an invaluable resource to 5k races and bake sales nation-wide.

But they aren’t the only ones. There’s another demographic that’s taken to volunteer work on the weekends: they’re fashionable twenty-somethings, living in college towns, buying local and composting. According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, the national rate of volunteering for 19-to 24-year-olds has increased to 19% between 2002 and 2009.

Photo cred: www.eventkeeper.com

These are the “New Volunteers”: eco-friendly, occupy-happy, and perhaps most importantly, tech-savvy. Somewhere between fact-checking local politicians on their smart phones and reading Catch-22 on their Kindles, these cats have become fluent in the language of the cybersphere. At any given moment, you might catch one simultaneously updating his or her Facebook status and importing a resume to LinkedIn—all while maintaining a steady stream of tweets to the suddenly made-cool-again vintage popstar, Madonna. They live in a digital age of instantaneous information-sharing. And guess what? They think volunteering is dank. That’s right—it’s official. Volunteers are cool again.

So, as a volunteer coordinator, how can you possibly cater to these two dramatically different populations? What is the best way to appease the demands of the “modern” volunteer without intimidating those who might find themselves less technologically plugged-in? The answer is simple: create an online registration process that is efficient, personable and easy to navigate—and that’s just what we’ve done here at VolunteerLocal. Our software is the quickest and simplest way to manage, schedule and communicate with volunteers of any age. VolunteerLocal allows you to streamline the volunteer registration process without clutter or added complication. That means no passwords, no hidden fees, and no accounts. So: the “new” volunteer demands efficiency, a personal touch, and a clean approach that doesn’t over-complicate the process? No problem. VolunteerLocal is the new software to meet your volunteers halfway there. That means happy volunteers—and, of course, happy volunteer coordinators.

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