Volunteer Spotlight | Angela Arroyo
Last year, the City of Birmingham opened a premier, state-of-the art indoor track facility, The CrossPlex at Birmingham. This facility allowed Alabama to once again offer a winter indoor track season, as a preparation for the outdoor track season. Because of the rarity of an indoor facility, the events also draw from neighboring states, and provide an exciting and competitive environment, yet place a high requirement for volunteer support.
Today, our spotlight shines on Angela Arroyo, who uses VolunteerSpot's online signup sheets to coordinate over 1500 volunteer hours during the annual indoor track and field season.
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Describe your volunteer needs.
We have over a hundred unique jobs, some duplicated up to four roles, for each of the four winter meets, requiring 1560 volunteer hours in one day. Adding to the uniqueness of our event is that there is a coalition of eight schools from our state to support and administrate the season. So our volunteer base is from eight schools-- parents that I would have never met, yet they can all access a common calendar.
How did you get involved in the program?
I got involved last year with our cross country and track program because I saw a need. Parents who wanted to help and be involved but weren't sure if they were in the way, what to do, when to show-up. My husband is a Children's Pastor and had used VolunteerSpot before for special events, so it was my first choice.
How did you implement VolunteerSpot?
After the cross country season, our Hoover High School coach noted the ease of clean-up when we had volunteers who knew what to do. He presented his ideas about the indoor season and we went to work! He had a great vision, and I am convinced that VolunteerSpot is one of the tools that translated that vision into a successful inaugural season.
He itemized the jobs, and times; I broke them into volunteer positions with detailed descriptions, loaded them into VolunteerSpot, and sent out the invitations to each of the eight school coaches, who in turn shared the link with their parents. The export feature was invaluable to us as I would export daily the information into Numbers to manipulate. We used the Premium Service and benefitted greatly from the additional fields of data that could be gathered.
Because the season is a coalition of schools, tracking hours to ensure balanced support was needed. We added a field for "School Representing" and Athlete's name. This made manipulating the data, adding a DURATION function to the spread sheet, and printing useable reports including a check-in/-out sheet, a very easy function! The officials at the meets commented on how nice it was to have adequate, purposed volunteers.
How has VolunteerSpot made your job as volunteer coordinator, easier?
Communicating specific details about each job would have been a full-time job without VolunteerSpot. Our volunteers came to the meets confident about the role they would play, and could look at past calendars to see who had worked the job previously, to ask for insight. They also knew the start and end time. Towards the end of the day, if a job was open-ended, we let the volunteer know that.
This year we have chosen to assign specific jobs to each of the eight schools, according to the interest. We then set-up a separate calendar for each school. This will place greater accountability on each school to provide volunteers, but will also allow a school to "specialize" in an specific aspect of the meet. Additionally, I think volunteers will appreciate fewer line items to review.
When all the jobs were together on one calendar, we would have 234 job/time combinations to choose from. This also lets volunteers work with their own parent base, hopefully providing a better strength of community. To do this, we used the Premium Service option of adding an additional administrator. Each school calendar is now primarily administered by their own administrator, and I have still have the ability to export summary reports and check status. In an emergency, I can assign volunteers from one school to fill open slots at another school. December 8th will be our first meet to function in this way, so it's too early to comment on the new set-up's success.
Do you have any advice for other volunteer leaders out there?
The best thing we can do for a volunteer is to give them as much concrete information as is possible. No one wants to walk into an ambiguous role; how will you know if you met expectations? I think volunteers feel respected, their time is respected and they feel productive and a part of the organization when they know that their time is being used wisely and in a beneficial way. I also believe when that level of preparation is made for volunteers, they will feel more committed to being present for their task, and doing it whole heartedly. We as organizers can greatly impact the perceptions of our volunteers, by how we prepare for their service.
Any final words to our readers?
If readers are in the southeast over the Christmas break, our school is hosting an Alumni Invitational, where our Alumni come back to be the volunteers for a meet. This meet is an OPEN indoor meet for all ages, elementary through age 18. You do not have to be part of a team, just sign-up UNATTACHED. It is a rare opportunity for elementary-aged, aspiring athletes, and is a great family environment. It also happens to fall at that time of the year when we've all had to much eating and sitting around, and wondering, "Isn't there something we can do?"
For sign-up, see http://tinyurl.com/IndoorTrackOpenMeet. We hope to see you there! Feel free to stop by the Volunteer Check-in and ask for Angela Arroyo.
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We salute Angela and all the other volunteer leaders out there making a difference. 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].
Today I urge you to take a moment, today, and add a volunteer project to your family’s
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