CiviCRM to organize volunteers in a sports event

[jehoysta]

I am in a sports club (track & field). We arrange several competitions every year. We have a pool of volunteers. Persons with different expirience. For each competition, we pick out people to do different tasks (starter, starter helper, timing, long jump staff, high jump staff etc.). We try to pick people with less experience to work with more experienced people (so that people can learn from each other). We also try to avoid that the same person beeing used in all our competitions.

We are looking for a system where we can asign tasks to people from our pool of volunteers. They dont aply to the task, we asign persons to a task. We wish for a system where we send an email (or a sms) to inform the person about their task and they have to reply to say if they can come or not. We also want so send reminders a few days before the competition. If people can not do their asigned task, we have to reasign the task to an other person.

I have been looking at CiviCRM Volunteer, but as I understand, people here have to show interest in beeing a volunteer in a spesific event. We have a pool of persons that already have showed interest to support the club and be volunteers / helpers in our competition. We want to asign tasks to persons already in our pool of persons. We want them to confirm that they are able to come to the event and do their task. We need a function to remind persons that have not answered, to confirm their task. We want to remind all confirmed persons of the event a few days ahead for the event/competition. It would be nice to have a history on every person showing the task they have been doing and how many hours they have been working.

Do you have a solution for us?

[Erik Hommel]

I think CiviCRM can do what you need. You will need to configure some activities probably, and some custom fields. But I think it can be done based on your short description.

One thing I would like to clarify though:

Do you have a solution for us?

There is no you, there is only us  CiviCRM is an open source piece of software. That means that we all maintain, configure and own it. That is a little different from having a closed source supplier, and has its pros and cons. More pros than cons if you ask me, but it is something that you should spend a little thought on before you embark.

[petednz]

Agree with Erik - but also thinking through some of the workflow - if you include checksums in your reminders so people get an 'instant login' to a prefilled form where they can just hit a 'confirm' button will help - but that also seems like the point at which I would want them to be adding that information to the Activity directly, and from memory that is not so easy using civi out-of-the-box (or wasn't, has anything changed) but can easily be undertaken when using Drupal as the CMS (I see you are on Joomla) thanks to the way the Webform-CiviCRM module brings more options together.

I think there is an option to have replies come in to civicrm so they get recorded as an Activity which might be the other way to automate a 'who confirmed v who did not' since that seems to be one of the pressure points in the workflow that i assume weould be desirable to at least semi-automate rather than having someone receiving the confirmations manually.

Ah, that said, where are we at with RSVP for events?

(apologies if this is another 'pete thinking aloud' type post)

[jehoysta]

Thank you for your replies.

Erik, I wrote to you as a group, that I dont concider my self as a part of (yet). I am very new to CiviCRM and I am concidering if CiviCRM is the right tool to use in my cenario. I am not in any chance capable of writing source code, but I am willing to pay someone to do it as long as it makes CiviCRM solve my problems. And I am willing to let others use that code and develop it further. 
I am sure that my needs are not unike. Every one that organizes sportsevents (or conserts etc), have the same kind of needs.

I will be thankful if someone could give advice to me in a less tecnical language, how I could use CiviCRM to solve my problems. An explain to me how I could support CiviCRM in a way that develops the CiviCRM to meet my needs.

I am not tied to Joomla, if Drupal makes tings easier, then I use Drupal.

[petednz]

Drupal definitely opens a lot of options in terms of letting people 'self manage' especially in regard to Activities (Tasks)

for example

You 'assign' the Task to the person - they get notified in one of several ways, and that notification can include a link back to a form, that will prefill with their name (and other contact details if you want) and lets the accept/decline the Activity.

This can then alert your managers to these so they can step in and find someone else they can assign that task to.

And they can have more options Drupal to have tables with filters to display the outcome/status of all the Task requests than CiviCRM directly offers IMO.

[Michael McAndrew]

Hey Jehoysta,

It might be useful talking to a few different service providers to get an idea about how they could help you.  See this list: https://civicrm.org/providers/

Also have a look at this list of people that are happy to talk to you about their CiviCRM experiences: https://www.civicrm.org/ambassadors

Michael