Event with multiple types of volunteers

[mikeicc]

We are trying to create a system to organize an event that has taken on a life of it's own.  The event is "Bag the Community" ( http://www.bagthecommunity.com ) and is a food drive for a local food pantry. The event has grown to almost a thousand volunteers and is difficult to manage on paper. We'd like to move to an online system but cannot find the right mix of features.

The process begins with people signing up to be a canvas volunteer, pickup, driver, or administration.

The canvas volunteer is assigned a section of the city with others to drop off empty bags on doorsteps
The pickup volunteer is also assigned a section of the city to then pickup the filled bags. (2 days later)
The driver volunteer is a driver (of a car or truck) to provide a place for the pickup volunteers to off-load their filled bags.
Administrative volunteers are required before, during, and after the event to organize, load semi's, and clean up.

All of these activities happen in a single weekend and we tried to get CiviCRM to work a couple of months ago but it just doesn't have the robustness we were looking to organize this chaos.

Any help with setting up the plugins would be appreciated.

[SarahG (FountainTribe)]

Have you tried using CiviVolunteer? Its designed to handle role and shift-based volunteering.

[SarahG (FountainTribe)]

More info about the CiviVolunteer extension is at: https://civicrm.org/extensions/civivolunteer

[Michael McAndrew]

Sounds like a great initiative.

we tried to get CiviCRM to work a couple of months ago

You might want to expand on why it didn't work to help people suggest work arounds.

but it just doesn't have the robustness we were looking to organize this chaos.

Not trying to be flippant here, but If you are describing it as chaos, I imagine any system is going to find it hard to organize.

You've described the processes but I'm not sure what you need help with.  People can probably help more if you describe what you would want your system to do (hard for us to guess that since we don't know much about the problems you are experiencing)

CiviVolunteer might work.

Or it might be that custom fields on contacts gives you enough functionality.

I would suggest start slowly so you can learn as you go on, and build simple systems can than help with part of the organising, rather than try and do everything at once.

Good luck and let us know how you get on