At the YMCA of Metropolitan Los Angeles, volunteers play a vital role in the fulfillment of our mission. They are involved at the highest levels of leadership and strategy in board and committee positions as well as on the frontlines as food distribution line helpers, camp counselors, membership ambassadors, volunteer campaigners and more. We are only able to have the incredible impact we do because we are supported by and partnered with our volunteers.

A team of staff and volunteer leaders at the YMCA of Metropolitan Los Angeles spent significant time in discussion with one another and with YMCA colleagues across the country to determine how best to address our need to more thoughtfully manage the volunteer registration and onboarding process. We discovered that VolunteerMatters exceeded our expectations early in the relationship. The benefits we have already experienced and foresee continuing are many and varied: easy access for volunteers and the ability to see and sign up for multiple opportunities; ability for staff to broadcast opportunities to large and/or specific audiences; centralized and consistent data collection and reporting; and more.

Prior to VolunteerMatters, we had several different types of software to track volunteers, most recently an Oracle-based customized system we called “YMAPSS.” We had also contemplated using other platforms that we currently use for other purposes such as Raiser’s Edge, ActiveNet, and even Dayforce. Ultimately we selected VolunteerMatters due to its background  in YMCA volunteerism, the positive feedback we received from other associations that had already begun using the system, and the excellent customer service provided by all members of the VolunteerMatters team from Support all the way to the President.

We chose to work with VolunteerMatters to help us streamline registration, paperwork, and management of our database of nearly 200 active volunteers. It has been useful to have a central location where volunteers can upload documents, especially our CDL volunteers who have to provide us with current required documents throughout the year. VM is a convenient resource for the volunteers to find details and updates regarding their assignments as well as an avenue for Farm Rescue to communicate our needs to specific groups of volunteers using the report filtering tools within the software.

We would not be able to accomplish what we do without our volunteers, they accomplish 68% of the work done at Food for Others. 

We felt VolunteerMatters understood our world and would work hard to make sure our volunteers had a positive experience when signing up or gathering information on what they wanted to help us with.

We went from an Excel spreadsheet to Signup Genius. We needed to get a “grownup” version of software that would be able to capture information and in turn be more methodical and strategic with our volunteer program, be ahead of the curve rather than putting out the fires.

Volunteers are vital to our program, freeing up bandwidth & absorbing workload from paid staff members. Our late & great founder, Shari Duval, always said that “the volunteers are the lifeblood of this organization.” She was definitely correct.

I have the pleasure of working with VolunteerMatters and of the great people, support and help that comes with it. The program is extremely intuitive and simple to use. When newly trained volunteers are granted access to VolunteerMatters, it helps give them the sense of belonging & membership they deserve.

Volunteers are crucial to the YMCA achieving its mission of promoting healthy spirit, mind, and body for all. Our volunteers live, play and work in the communities in which they serve and they are a constant source of insight into how we can improve our programs.

Our Y serves 12 counties in 2 states. With such a large service area, we knew we needed to have a robust volunteer data management system. We wanted to make sure we were screening and training volunteers without having them have to repeat paperwork with each program and branch in which they worked. We are happy with the way we can easily see who has completed the steps in our screening and onboarding process. We also like that you can upload documents so things like reference check information can be stored with a volunteer's profile. It has also been great to be able to pull up rosters for annual programs. Being able to email everyone who worked on a project the previous year to see if they want to return and help us the next year is very convenient for us and our volunteers. Categorizing our projects by their impact area has helped volunteers who are passionate about certain types of work to get involved in what is happening across our association and not just at one branch.

Our organization is an all-volunteer group which is a support auxiliary of the Kansas City Symphony, a nonprofit orchestra. Our largest fundraiser requires the use of over 300 volunteers over a period of 3-4 weeks. VolunteerMatters allows us to manage these and other volunteer shifts efficiently. It reduces the staffing burden of management by allowing volunteers to sign up for shifts. It gives management a quick view of the staffing levels. And it allows for feedback from volunteers for process improvement.

Mane in Heaven is an all-volunteer based organization. Our volunteers are truly the heart and foundation of Mane in heaven. We love partnering with VolunteerMatters. We are an all volunteer based organization. Our volunteers do it all . VolunteerMatters is a great tool to help keep all operations running and organized. We love that volunteers can see the calendar and volunteer opportunities and sign up on their own and manage their own schedule. We also love the fact that we can send group emails to keep our volunteers informed. The support has also been great with VolunteerMatters.

Volunteers are the backbone of our day to day operations at the Military Heritage Museum. Before I came aboard, the museum used an internal system to track hours. After going through the data and seeing how fast the museum was growing and all the programs our Executive Director wanted to bring to the museum, I foresaw the need to expand our volunteer force and find software to help keep us organized. After going through several demos of volunteer management software, I found that VolunteerMatters not only worked well with our internal system but the interface was very straight forward and allowed our very senior volunteers to navigate with ease. The platform also allows us to setup a check-in/out kiosk for our volunteers, which is another big time saver for us.

Our volunteers are the heart and soul of our nonprofit. We operate with a staff of eight, and the rest of our team is made up of about 115 volunteers. Before VolunteerMatters, we did not have any other software program to manage our volunteers. We did it all by hand, and to tell you the truth it was sort of a mess. We had files for every volunteer, but we were not able to systematically keep track of what volunteers needed or achieved. With VolunteerMatters, life has been simplified. We are even using the system to track demographics and impact metrics! The ease with which volunteers can simply log in, or set up calendars and projects, made using VolunteersMatters the easy choice. It covered our full gamut of needs. Customer Support has been so very helpful in answering all our questions and getting the system to work the way that we needed. I tell you, they can work wonders.

Volunteers play a vital role in helping support our staff team with the work that we do on a daily basis. Especially during the pandemic when we had to shift our volunteer opportunities, we had a great response from our volunteer community to support the new things that we could offer through volunteer service and the VolunteerMatters platform was a great help in organizing these activities.

We saw a need within a growing volunteer community to be more efficient in how we organized our Volunteer Program across our YMCA Association. VolunteerMatters has helped provide that structure from contacts and credential tracking to project setup and volunteer metrics. The team at VolunteerMatters is also very supportive of our work with responding to questions and assisting us with making sure we have the best setup for our needs.

I would say volunteers are important for us to build community and support our student body. We chose VolunteerMatters for ease of use, both for our volunteers and for our staff.

As a nonprofit performing arts center, it is our mission to connect our community with exceptional arts experiences in our historic theater. We would be unable to fulfill that mission without the dedication of our volunteers, who donate thousands of hours of their time each year. When I was researching volunteer software, VolunteerMatters presented a very unique, friendly, and most importantly POSITIVE, message coming from the leaders of the company. I still receive very uplifting emails that are sometimes just saying “Hope you are having a good day!” from the leaders of this software team.

With VolunteerMatters, I felt excited and eager to embark on this new phase for our company and I have been supported every step of the way and do not feel hesitant to ask questions.

In the last 5 months I have been able to easily correspond with our volunteers, create shifts for them to sign up for, and am able to track hours of dedication from the amazing people who volunteer for us. This software saves me countless hours each month that I used to spend manually entering info into spreadsheets. I am so thrilled by it and can now focus on creating new avenues for our volunteers to continue impacting our community.

Volunteers are crucial to our mission here at the Red River Zoo. I was inspired to work with VolunteerMatters when I took over as Volunteer Coordinator. I was looking for a way to streamline volunteer assignment signups, communications with volunteers, and collect volunteer feedback. I've already received feedback from our volunteers that they appreciate the ease of signing up for shifts and tracking their hours.

I couldn’t manage many of our events without the help of our incredible volunteers. VolunteerMatters is an incredibly easy way for me to not only plan events, but make sure I know who’s who and who will be there.

Volunteers are essential to the YMCA mission. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to serve the thousands of people in our community to live healthier lives.

We switched to VolunteerMatters as we needed a platform that would allow us to work easily with large corporations looking for volunteer opportunities. Since we switched, we have had a higher turn out and retention rate of volunteers than ever before.

We looked at other options including our existing Raiser’s Edge system but the [Raiser's Edge] public facing interface was not easy to navigate. We needed something simple and user friendly!

Our volunteers greatly expand our capacity to distribute food to our community. We were inspired to work with VolunteerMatters in order to both better organize and grow our volunteer base. Having this easy-to-use volunteer portal has made our volunteer program more approachable to people across the city of Denver. It has also made it easier for us to promote new volunteer opportunities to our community. It is now easier for us to track hours and reward our most loyal volunteers for all of their support.

The Ion Center could not fully carry out our mission if not for the incredible, compassionate advocacy of our volunteers. We wanted a volunteer management system that could fully capture everything we needed: scheduling, reminders, storing all needed documents for program monitoring, and the functionality of giving us impact reports about volunteer hours. VolunteerMatters does all of that and more. I feel that the program has helped us find a stronger organizational system for our volunteers, and lessens the amount of time that it was taking for our volunteer coordinator to collect data, thus allowing them to spend more time on recruitment of volunteers.

Our volunteers are the heart of our thrift stores! We are able to maximize our donations back to the ministry of Many Hands for Haiti because of the many volunteers who serve at our stores.

As a growing organization, we needed software that would grow with us, streamline the day-to-day tasks, and help us keep better records. Using VolunteerMatters has helped save us time and do more without having to hire additional staff.

Because of the current Afghan refugee crisis, the Nationalities Service Center went from 100 to 1,000 volunteers almost overnight. Our previous systems put into place simply did not scale. We would not have been able to pull any of this off without VolunteerMatters.

During the height of the Afghan crisis, we needed both child care volunteers and volunteers to distribute meals everyday. With the help of VolunteerMatters we were able to have hundreds of volunteers access a platform to sign up for these tasks. The platform was user-friendly, and allowed us to clear volunteers in a timely manner.

Our volunteers at NSC grew by tenfold during that time. This extreme growth allowed us to take a look at the way we approach volunteerism. We learned quickly we needed a better way to advertise volunteer openings to the public and process clearances. VolunteerMatters allowed us to do that in a clean and organized way, which freed up staff to focus on programming rather than administrative tasks.

Volunteers are a critical part of the Mystic Valley YMCA's ability to meet its mission. We offer multiple programs addressing Food Insecurity, including operating 3 food pantries which collectively distribute over 2.5 million pounds of free, nutritious food annually to the 29,000 individuals we serve.

We became interested in VolunteerMatters when the number of volunteers we had spiked during the service demands presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. Multiple administrative staff were coordinating the recruitment, screening, onboarding, placement and support of volunteers while simultaneously working in direct service and it was too easy for paperwork management to get confusing or for people to fall through the cracks and get frustrated that the process was taking longer than anticipated. VolunteerMatters enabled us to create volunteer opportunities unique to our sites and different programs, streamline our credentialing process, keep all volunteer information in one location, integrate with our online training provider for any required trainings, and more.

We are more organized and able to move volunteers through our process much more quickly and efficiently, all while ensuring that every volunteer has completed all of the required policy review and approval, safety training, and background check screenings. We just went through our first round of annual reminders to volunteers, and that automated process was very helpful in making sure that our volunteers have refresher training and new background checks each year.

Every year volunteers contribute thousands of hours of their time to help us achieve our goals. We are grateful for all that they do and want their experience as a volunteer to be as enjoyable as possible. VolunteerMatters helps us streamline our application process, eliminated a dated system that was neither simple nor efficient. It also makes it easier for our volunteers to learn about and sign-up for new volunteer opportunities. VolunteerMatters not only makes the volunteer experience more enjoyable for our current volunteers, but it also allows us to better recruit new volunteers.

VolunteerMatters came highly recommended from a co-worker who had worked with VolunteerMatters through a local Los Angeles-based organization. VolunteerMatters was touted as an ‘amazing software for all volunteer needs.’ Compared to our old software set-up, VolunteerMatters has consolidated three separate software/platforms into one! We can now accept applications, forms/waivers, and shift sign-ups all within VolunteerMatters. With several hundred volunteers supporting the shelter, switching to VolunteerMatters will save us so much time and energy.

There were many reasons why we decided to switch from Volgistics to VolunteerMatters. The Administrative interface was much easier to use; the fact that volunteers could have their profile made our programs look more professional and would help engage the volunteers more; the ease with which we could track volunteers and their service hours was substantially more; we could now easily house our programs and sign up schedules; VolunteerMatters also helps us configure credentials for volunteers to complete prior to sign-up for programs (which in and of itself saves of a lot of time); and all of these functions are available at about the same price as Volgistics, too. It has been about 2 months since our transition and we have already seen a big difference in the way we engage our volunteers.

OUTMemphis volunteers not only represent but carry out our mission to empower, educate, connect, and advocate for the Mid-South LGBTQ+ community.

With only 12 full-time staff members, compared to the thousands of community members served, volunteers are truly the backbone of bringing our strategic plan to life. Before working at OUTMemphis as a staff member, I volunteered for more than 3 years as a front-desk assistant and as a youth group facilitator. We used Volgistics to sign up for shifts, but that was basically it. I never engaged with my volunteer profile, there were no specific titles or positions I could hold, and I never received any communication from the volunteer coordinator through the platform (just direct emails). With VolunteerMatters, all of those functions and more are accessible, interactive, and autonomous. Not only do volunteers self-schedule their shifts, they can also self-report the hours they've worked and edit their profile preferences to their liking. There's an unlimited amount of shift roles that I can create, so volunteers can work with me to create their own role, schedule, or position! VolunteerMatters aligns seamlessly with our value of having a fully-engaged community that can create its own opportunities.

As stated above, Volgistics did not have the visual or operational format that I was looking for as a new hire. Given the tremendous growth we've experienced over the pandemic, I wanted a platform that had the infrastructure to be more than a scheduling tool. VolunteerMatters also acts as a volunteer hub for OUTMemphis. And with volunteers being one of our foundational values, it's been easy to create a space where any questions can be answered, new opportunities can be viewed without a login, and all volunteer communication can be consolidated in one place.

Volunteers touch every aspect of our organization! They sort donations, they work directly with clients to choose appropriate interview attire, they act as career mentors, staff our annual fundraiser and have even represented us in a local parade.

I chose VolunteerMatters for 2 main reasons - the customer service and the reporting features. Prior to VolunteerMatters I worked with a competitor whose customer service did not respond in a timely manner, or when they did it was with caustic or belittling responses.  The reports were pre set and often didn't match the information I needed.

The VolunteerMatters chat support feature is a life saver and they are so patient with my endless questions.  From a reporting perspective, it is nice to be able to create custom searches and export volunteer information in just a few clicks.

Volunteerism has been at the core of the Y since our founding. We chose VolunteerMatters to work with because we know we only have one chance to make a positive first impression. VolunteerMatters allows for a seamless onboarding for our volunteers that removes barriers that could discourage a potential volunteer. VolunteerMatters allows us to retain historical data on both individual volunteers and the impact of the volunteer program in general in a consistent manner across all of the branches that make up our Association.