Date: September 30, 2026

Topic: Volunteer management software — three program walkthroughs, virtual volunteers, and links to client scheduling

Session Overview

• Three presenters walked through the systems their programs use to recruit, schedule, and track volunteers, followed by open questions and discussion.
• Notes are generated with AI assistance and anonymized before publishing — participant names and identifying program details are left out below. Organizations, software, and public resources mentioned by name are kept in for reference.

Salesforce (nonprofit add-on)

• Why: The program previously used a website form that fed an Excel sheet wiped every year, so volunteers could not be tracked over time. It moved to a Salesforce add-on already used for donor tracking. Setup took substantial time.
• Volunteer side: Two entry points, new or experienced (“experienced” simply means the person has already completed the registration form, even if they never volunteered). The form collects contact information, LinkedIn profile, company or school affiliation (for corporate outreach and student class credit), language skills, CPA status, emergency contact, and a checkbox acknowledging the volunteer handbook, which covers liability. Each volunteer gets a record and a personal dashboard to update their info, see upcoming shifts and history, and sign up from a calendar. Signing up triggers a confirmation email with the handbook and training video links, plus a reminder email, all pre-programmed.
• Admin side: Customizable dashboard showing volunteers signed up, top volunteer hours, unique volunteers versus attendees (repeat visits), each opening a detailed report. Shifts list the job and location because volunteers often want a specific site. The program runs many locations, only one of which is a VITA site, all tracked in one database.
• Check-in: Admins or site coordinators can add volunteers or log hours after the fact. On site, the site manager checks volunteers in on an iPad so nobody (e.g., student volunteers) is signed in by someone else; no-shows get no credit.
• Build & cost: Built with pro bono help — volunteer programmers, college students, Salesforce employees, and Catchafire (which requires payment or a funder). Free but slow. Salesforce offers nonprofits 10 free user licenses through a certification process. Tip: make a call-out to your own volunteer base for someone with Salesforce experience. Drawback: a plain interface that is hard to customize.

Volunteer Local

• Eight metro sites had outgrown Excel. Volunteer Local is simple and password-free: volunteers browse shifts, self-sign up, and can see who else is signed up (useful for volunteers who like working with a particular group). Admins search for a volunteer to see years of service, hours, and past, current, and canceled shifts.
• Check-in: Volunteers check themselves in and out. For senior volunteers, a QR code built in Canva and printed as stickers is placed on each laptop so they can scan to check in. If someone forgets, an admin can check them out manually.
• Features: Jobs and slots are adjustable by day, time, and role — e.g., off-season needs a site coordinator and three preparers; in season add a greeter, a second coordinator, and more preparers. Each job shows qualifications and duties. Filtering by certification is available (unused here, since all volunteers are advanced-certified). One-click emails everyone signed up for a shift (e.g., weather cancellations). Reports filter by site and job, and hours reporting went from “a nightmare” in Excel to “just a click.”
• Plan & cost: The Discover (basic) plan is $600/year with unlimited features and two admin seats; hours and attendance tracking are included. Most sites are appointment-only, so shift sign-up counts are used to open taxpayer appointment slots in Waitwhile.

Moving Away from Get Connected (Galaxy Digital)

• Where it fell short: Get Connected works reasonably well for smaller organizations or programs with fewer volunteers. This program had over 600 volunteers last year and is aiming for about 800, and found it very hard to manage them in such a basic system.
• Specific problems: It could not link shifts together, took a very long time to load, and its reporting is just a raw dump of responses that then had to go into a pivot table. The training sign-up process could never be plugged into it, so the program ran training registration through a Microsoft Word/Forms setup with a lot of logic, and used Formstack for certificate uploads. The presenter called it “a huge mess” that had been tolerated for years without working.
• The core requirement: The program does not want volunteers signing up for one-off or “onesie-twosie” shifts. It wants a commitment to the full 13-week tax season on a single fixed weekly slot (e.g., Tuesdays 12 to 4), with no choice of individual dates; if someone cannot do that slot for at least 8 or 10 of the 13 weeks, the program would rather they not volunteer. Many volunteer platforms instead show volunteers the whole menu of shifts and let them pick. Because Get Connected could not link shifts, the workaround was to create “dummy” shifts in which the first shift of the season stood in for the rest.
• What drove the decision: The presenter had complained about Get Connected for years while cobbling together Get Connected responses, a Microsoft Form, and Formstack uploads. Volunteer management at the organization is essentially one person, who also creates most of the recruitment marketing material and is involved in hiring, so the workload with this many volunteers had become impossible to sustain. The inability to find software that linked shifts had been the “Achilles’ heel” of the search.
• How it got approved: After finding Rosterfy, the presenter did roughly 18 to 20 hours of demos before feeling confident, then “ambushed” the IT department and pushed the purchase through. When asked by the facilitator how to win buy-in from leadership (CEO, CFO), the honest answer was “brute force” — years of pain and not letting anyone stop it.

Rosterfy

• What it will hold: The program is moving everything into Rosterfy: the tax shifts (as events), volunteer training, and certification uploads tied to the volunteer agreement. Shifts can be linked, so signing up for one Tuesday signs a volunteer up for all of them.
• Automation & permissions: Built-in automation that can be made very granular. Seasonal site managers can be added as “light admins,” with permissions set down to the detail — for example, view only certain forms, see only responses, read versus edit access, or see emails but not update them.
• Data & reporting: Rosterfy saves data to the volunteer’s profile rather than to each form. Instead of pulling raw form responses and merging them with other Excel sheets, the program can build a custom report from any profile information — e.g., training registration responses plus each volunteer’s name and phone number — and save it as a report type to run whenever needed.
• Groups: Volunteers can be placed automatically into multiple groups (e.g., 2027 volunteers, 2028 volunteers, students), and what each group sees can be controlled — for instance, limiting student volunteers to certain shifts.
• Volunteer experience & screening: Volunteers can filter by role and location, search for what is closest, or type a site and role. Pre-questions can stop people from registering for shifts they should not take; applicants land in a pending status for review, and ineligible sign-ups can be rejected before they cause confusion. Questions can be asked before and after registration.
• Cost: $8,000 per year, including SMS texting and other features, on a plan for up to 1,000 volunteers.
• Follow-up discussion: One participant wanted to track certification level year over year (e.g., 2026 versus 2025) to spot trends. Groups and labels should make that possible, and an automation can add volunteers to a certification group automatically whenever they meet the trigger, so nobody tags each person manually. The automations weren’t all built yet because the focus was on launching. The participant noted their own software keeps adding features that must be relearned each year, with automation buried inside individual events, and that Rosterfy’s approach seemed more logical.
• Status: Rosterfy had not been live-tested — recruitment was launching the next day — though a couple of tests had gone well. The presenter was optimistic but cautioned that the opinion might change after a full season.

Managing Virtual Volunteers

• Challenges raised: no manager checking volunteers in and out, tracking remote hours accurately, and having coverage when an intake or quality review call is needed.
• Approach 1: Experienced volunteers only for virtual tax prep, since a frictionless virtual start can turn new volunteers off; shift times can be looser. A Slack channel assigns volunteers to numbered clients as they move through stages (Contacted, Waiting for Documents, Tax Prepared, QR’d, Ready for transmission), and an open Zoom runs for the whole shift where site managers check in and spot-check Slack statuses.
• Approach 2: Live Zoom events scheduled in Acuity for both volunteers and clients; volunteers are asked for about 8 shifts from a roughly 44-shift schedule, and client appointments are released based on who signs up. For Get Your Refund, very experienced volunteers handle intake and quality review over Zoom using canned responses and shared Zoom accounts; clients book a 15-minute intake interview, then volunteers prepare asynchronously. Progress is tracked in a spreadsheet, since the stages in Get Your Refund make follow-up hard to see.
• A program with fully virtual options was offered to be a referral partner for volunteers who want flexible, ad hoc opportunities that fixed-schedule programs can’t accommodate; contact details were shared in chat.

Linking to Client Scheduling

• Two programs are walk-in only (one is piloting appointments on Sundays at a couple of sites; the other found appointments don’t fit its client base and is trying an RSVP model, where heavy RSVPs let staff suggest another day). One program uses Waitwhile and mostly appointment-only sites, accepting no-shows to avoid long walk-in waits. The facilitator moved from walk-in only to appointments as tools became easier, with reminders.
• Notes from the earlier appointment scheduling software discussion (September 2) are posted on VITAquality.org: Society for Free Tax Assistance: VITA Meet-up Notes (9/2/26)
• A participant asked whether DaySmart handles both client and volunteer scheduling; no one knew.

Other Items

• Has anyone seen the updated Pub 5451 (Volunteer Orientation Guide)? One team has mostly been looking at 1040 changes and the new public charge guidance.
• Two attendees said RAISE Texas was a great chance to see a large operation and meet people. One participant observed that every system seems to need some adjustment — there is no perfect fit.
• Prosperity Now VITA grant cohorts were expected to be announced before VITACon; this was not confirmed. Many applied, since last year’s applications were rolled over.
• VITACon is next week. Because of travel and a personal conflict, the facilitator may cancel the next meeting and will give early notice. A backup facilitator is being considered so the conversation can continue when he is unavailable.

The Society for Free Tax Assistance  •  VITAquality.org  •  a project of JC Craig Consulting