Austin Parks Foundation, Philadelphia’s Love Your Park, and Earth Day Columbus are examples of organizations leading the way in their Earth Day efforts!
Austin Parks Foundation (APF) has found a way to not only engage, but also to empower their volunteers. Twice a year, APF invites Austinites to submit clean-up/conservation activities at a park of their choosing through GivePulse.
In collaboration with APF, Austin Parks and Recreation, a department within the City of Austin, aims to empower foundations and organizations like APF to facilitate the projects to support the City’s parks. Through this network, Austin Parks and Rec is able to facilitate adopt-a-park programs and promote events so that everyone who wants to participate can easily do so through one, centralized page.
Similarly, Love Your Park hosts events in partnership with over 100 of their community partners. “GivePulse has been extremely helpful in providing automated confirmations, reminders, and follow-ups to our volunteers… We can manage the overall event and empower our park friends group with a really useful tool. The app has streamlined the check-in process on the morning of the event,” says Lindsey Walker, their volunteer coordinator.
For all the aspiring Leslie Knopes of the world or for those who just want to help make the world a little greener, here are some scenarios we believe coordinating volunteers for Earth Day will encounter:
I want to host an event with multiple different projects and locations. How do I solicit ideas from the community and publish these as opportunities?
Organizations like APF have set up a submission form to allow partners and project leaders to submit ideas. In their form, they include details of the project and the tools (e.g. the number of shovels, pounds of mulch, number of wheel-barrels, number of forks etc.) needed to successfully complete the task at hand. In many instances, this project submission needs to be reviewed, vetted, and verified by multiple stakeholders before it’s published for people to register and volunteer to. Feel free to reach out to GivePulse if you are interested in learning more about how we help foundations like this to address these pain points.
How can I assign additional folks as project leaders with limited access? I can’t be everywhere at the same time!
When planning events and projects with different locations, we recommend identifying a few volunteer leads that can represent the organization well. Specifically, the volunteer lead should be trained and given project level access to help oversee the registration and management of the site(s). In some instances, you’d probably want to identify who has administrative access just to manage one event, one shift, or many events. Depending on their level of access, this will give you the control and delegation powers to streamline the management of a large scale event. Organizations like APF and Love Your Park leverage GivePulse to assign different roles to your members and volunteers; it’s the next best thing to cloning yourself!
How can on-the-go project leaders track who is present or a no-show?
Volunteers and project leaders are on the go during the event. They will need mobile access to manage and track volunteers who show up on the day of the event and to also determine who is officially checked into the event. APF and Love Your Park leverage our downloadable mobile app to swipe folks in (as attended) or to swipe folks out (if they are a no-show). In many instances, if they need to be added at the last minute, the mobile downloadable app allows them to add new folks in and to add notes for documentation purposes.
To help kick off Earth month appropriately, the GivePulse team will be volunteering in early April. How are you creating an impact? We’d love to know!