We want to put a shout out to the 1st Annual Chicago International Movies and Music Festival for a best-practice use of VolunteerSpot for signing up and scheduling volunteers. Using our simple and free signup tool, Festival leader Jenny Pfafflin was able to recruit and fill close to 100 volunteer spots to help at four venues over six days in Chicago, March 4-9, 2009.
Since Spring is the season of local Art, Music and Film festivals, we thought we'd share the CIMM Fest signup as a VolunteerSpot best practice.
Using a combination of website links, Cragislist, and inviting volunteers via email, here are a few screen shots to see how she did it.
Jenny setup her volunteer calendar using Volunteer Spot's simple Plan Now Wizard. Here's a shot of her signup:
When configuring her signup, she clicked the option to Invite Volunteers with a Link, getting code snippets that look something like this:
The first line, the URL code, she linked to a custom button on the CIMM Fest Website that said , Volunteer Now. It was formatted just like the rest of the website.
The second line of code, Embed, was an HTML string including the VolunteerSpot Sign up button that she pasted on Craigslist (in the volunteer section for her city) that looked like this:
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Clicking either the link on Craigslist or on the CIMM Fest website, brought volunteers to this page on VolunteerSpot:
On this page, volunteers enter their email address and are sent a custom sign up invitation from the volunteer organizer. This step is important to be sure live people (and not spam robots) are signing up for your event. Below is a screen shot of her actual email invite. Read it (click to enlarge the image) -- she did a great job customizing the signup message to help volunteers understand what happens next.
Clicking Sign Up Now brings you to our first screen shot in this message. Volunteers select a day and then can choose specific shifts and venues to fit their schedules. What happens next:
The volunteer organizer can check volunteer status at any time, can print sign in sheets and rosters and download all the signup information in an Excel spreadsheet.
Let the fun begin!!
Thanks CIMM Fest for showing us all how it's done. If you've got a community Art, Music, or Film Festival coming up this season -- please let VolunteerSpot streamline your volunteer coordination and make signups and reminders a snap!