VolunteerMatters for YMCAs

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.