[Music] okay so here I am going to be showing you how to coordinate your volunteer team more efficiently and effectively and this tool Google sheet can be used whether you're talking about a special event regular donors on a weekly basis 24-hour phonathon or to plan out your volunteer schedule for the entire year again this is what I recommend using with regular donors that you've already done background checks on if they need to know their skill set and other dependability I would not recommend Google sheets to recruit new volunteers this is where your current volunteer team so what we're gonna do right now is go ahead and create a Google sheet for the upcoming fundraising event and you can see down here this is my life in the last few days so we're gonna go right here to Google sheets blank document okay and you'll see untitled sheet I'm gonna go ahead and change the title just to and before I even get started kind of getting the content I'm gonna make sure that it looks like a table so it's also visually friendly for the people that I'm gonna share access to this table so what I'm doing right now is inserting a head row this is maybe less concerning to I'm gonna go and emerge that header cell and I always like to put the times and dates on every little thing you do so so there we go the volunteers schedule for the March 3rd dinner event we're gonna make it look pretty I'll make it a lot centering things now on to the good stuff the life-changing moment of how to coordinate volunteers more efficiently and effectively ok so the dinner fundraising an event for consulting the event actually starts at 6:00 but what I'm gonna do is put set up 4:30 to 5:30 you'll be my set-up time I really want to my volunteers to be in the place well before people start showing up then I want 5:30 so that people are cross-trained 2 7 will be shipped 1 7 to 8:30 and the 9th is the people we're really gonna start leaving around 8:00 so we'll go ahead and do 8:30 to 9:30 will be commitment for teardown ok and again with how I function I'm gonna make sure to wrap text and we're gonna go format this at the end but what I'm assuming is for each job that there are two people so I'm gonna leave two little slots okay the first job is a registration table there are two peoples in the lead slot there the next job I have for my event we're selling cookies so I'm just gonna put cookies there again two slots 50/50 ticket well go ahead and probably is not actually gonna happen but just because I have two extra spaces I'm gonna put all the dancing we pull have some elf dancing in March who knows anyway okay so what I'm gonna do before I really start formatting this anymore in Google Forms there's this thing called filtering and what that's gonna do is allow you to order things by time or alphabetically or pull out certain answers so I'm just gonna click filter and what it looks like then is that the table actually has functional headers again in a second I'll hopefully fast forward but I put this [Music] and for me to make it more visually appealing and so people understand I am going to have each group of to a different color of green and now for the genius so we're so used to as volunteer coordinators deciding what volunteers we need right sending out an email to the 20 people in our volunteer team and our board having them all respond back that they all one works the registration table from 5:30 to 7:00 right and then us having to suggest other things and it's a back and forth and back and forth and back and forth that if you're trying to coordinate 20 volunteers for one event I'd say probably eats up if you did all the math 12 hours of your time and you're still then going to have out and having to recruit or a few more people okay this is what I call the Google sheeps volunteer management miracle and I've only discovered this by a failing forward in volunteer management okay so you've created a little sheet you know you need to at each of these times we probably don't need any elf dancing during teardown we also probably do not need a registration table teardown so we think they're gonna start tearing down during this time center that because we are picky about things and we probably don't need help dancing during setup either so we've determined that those are slots that don't need anything we want to make sure that our volunteers know they're to slot per each but whatever your agency name okay and probably use correct punctuation all right so each role okay so what this does a couple things that's right it cuts up with you as the middleman but it also allows you to kind of communicate with your volunteers without having to communicate so let's say the most important time during registration is when people are first coming in and you'll get a big massive right I'll go back I'm like 550 to 610 it's just crazy so you want to make sure that you are most efficient and effective volunteers that are good with money and multitasking or their so before you even send us out maybe Cindy and John John John are you know that they're great and are stellar and we also know this is a really price pot all volunteers once before you even send it out I would just put their names down maybe even a little question mark so that they could just confirm okay so really right now you're like 20 minutes away from having all these volunteer slots filled what you're going to do hopefully you have an another spreadsheet somewhere of all your possible volunteers whether you're downloading it from your donor management software your volunteer management software will keep a little Excel spreadsheets whether it's just you searching through your email okay you have this all done right for the fundraising event you know all the volunteer slots you need you are going to click right now only you can see it you're gonna click share you're going to type in you're going to type in all of your volunteers right here okay make sure over here on the right that it's not can view or can comment really does can't edit and you're gonna say hello wonderful volunteer team and then probably also explained to them what to do like click here on the shareable link and write your name where you're committing so keep the emails short and sweet especially if these are volunteers you've already engaged with like maybe they're on your coordination committee keep it short and sweet make it clear that they can sign up themselves and voila give it up and give them a deadline so if today's on Monday say please by Friday sign up you can go in and check as if you know you have those eager eager beaver volunteers that are all trying to sign up at the same time as soon as you send out this email and jams trying to fight for the slept Cyndi already has and they all want to be elf dancing at 5:30 you no longer have to fight that battle back and forth your volunteers and who you're gonna make happy who aren't gonna make happy you're just gonna let them sign up themselves first-come first-served basis and you cut out yourself as the middleman and instead of those 47 emails that you're gonna get today in response to this you're gonna go on about your day continue to be productive and tomorrow you're gonna open up your inbox and go back to your Google sheet and notice that everything's been done for you so that's just one step to do things more efficiently and effectively for volunteer management when you already have your volunteers in place