Healing comes in many ways. LifeStriders is a non-profit organization that provides life-enhancing, physical and psychological experiences and services, to individuals with special needs. Through Equine-Assisted Therapy, children and adults can experience the beneficial physical and mental benefits achieved through the human-horse connection.
Today, our Volunteer Spotlight shines on Robert Conley, president of Lifestriders. They use VolunteerSpot to coordinate over 140 weekly volunteers.
Please tell us about Lifestriders and your volunteer needs.
Our organization is an equestrian therapeutic riding center that requires three volunteers per rider for every class. We give about 12 classes per week with four riders in every class for 26 weeks, which comes to approximately 1000 lessons. That's 144 volunteer hours/week. We also offer programming in social skills that requires four volunteers per hour and we have an at-risk youth program designed to foster at-risk youth volunteering in the community. Volunteers usually come out for two or three consecutive hours according to what works best for their schedule. Needless to say, tracking and managing all of the volunteers is one of our biggest challenges.
How did you become a volunteer leader?
Veronica Sosa and I started LifeStriders therapeutic riding center six years ago and grew the need organically.
What’s one piece of advice you have for volunteers or their leaders out there?
Get VolunteerSpot and communicate with your volunteers often.
Why did you decide to use VolunteerSpot?
It simply saves us a lot of time. In the last six years we have evaluated many tools and workflows to try and manage this "army", but none have addressed our needs the way VolunteerSpot was able to. We were looking for a system that:
- Would be easy for a coordinator to learn, set up, and administrate
- Shows how many volunteers were signed up for any given day / event
- Allows volunteers to easily manage their own schedule with minimal account setup and login
- Notified us if a volunteer cancelled within 48 hrs of their scheduled time slot
- Sends out reminder emails 48 hrs ahead of scheduled time slots
- Allowed a volunteer coordinator to see all the volunteers for a specific day
- Messages a filtered group of volunteers
NONE of the systems on the market today do this as well as VolunteerSpot, and while others may have a similar feature set, what sets VolunteerSpot apart are the efficient workflows with dynamic interfaces to accomplish all of these tasks. All of this translates to massive time savings in the setup and administration of the software and in the task of volunteer coordination. I don't think any other current system can come close to satisfying our needs in these ways for years, unless they scrap their current workflows and interfaces and start from scratch. I would highly recommend VolunteerSpot to anyone trying to manage the volunteers at a therapeutic riding center.
Anything else you’d like our readers to know about your organization or volunteering?
Volunteering at a therapeutic riding center is one of the most enlightening experiences you can have. Find your local therapeutic riding center and sign up to help out in any way you can. You will not be sorry.
To learn more, visit http://www.lifestriders.org
---
We salute Robert and all the volunteer leaders working to help others. If you're using VolunteerSpot, write and tell us about what you're doing, and give us a chance to shine our Volunteer Spotlight on you!! Just email us at [email protected].
