If you’ve ever been left in charge of organising a fundraiser, event or some sort of rostering of volunteers, you’ll appreciate that it can be seriously hard work. Thankfully, so does at least one young mother who was sick of all the difficulties of volunteering for school canteen and other school-related events. She got so sick of it, that she created Volunteer Spot to make it easy for everyone.

Volunteer Spot makes life easy for both the organiser and the volunteers by allowing everyone easy access to a complete rostering calendar and a simple way to nominate themselves for tasks. It really is a fantastic tool to coordinate volunteers.

The organiser can sign up for a free account which allows you to have up to 10 assistant organisers for your activities and unlimited activities. Volunteer spaces aren’t limited at all on the free account, but to avoid spamming you can only invite 50 people at a time. You can also invite people via mailing lists or on your website with a direct link to your activity.

Please note that free accounts are designed for non-profits and small groups. If you are a corporation, they hope that you’ll pay your way to keep it free for the others. Be kind! Premium members also get other useful perks, like being able to ask volunteers for their t-shirt size.

Volunteers can either sign up for an account or just give enough details to respond to your invitation. The whole system is designed to make it easy for non-techy volunteers to respond and participate. Once a volunteer has signed up for an activity, the system will automatically remind them of their commitments by email before the event.

Activity volunteers view a simple calendar and can click on any available day to see which tasks still need doing or which things need to be brought. They nominate themselves for the days and tasks they want to do. At any stage they can click on “View spots” or “Print spots” to see/print all the tasks they’ve signed up for. Simple!

Activity co-ordinators have an equally simple set-up process, although they do need to create a proper account. Activities can be created as ongoing rosters or as a stand-alone sign-up sheet for a one-off event.

Then simply list the tasks that need doing and the things that need to be brought to the event.

Once one day is completed, the whole day can be copied to another day, making it easy to create recurring rosters.

Organisers even have the ability to manually add volunteers who don’t have internet access, then the system will remind the organiser to get in touch with those people.

Take a look at the demonstration video to see just how easy it really is.

For volunteer co-ordinators, this system will save you much time and stress. However, one of the best outcomes of using a system like this to co-ordinate volunteering is that you’re likely to wind up with more volunteers offering to help. Many potential volunteers are put off by disorganisation and endless re-structuring. Make it easy for people to help out and more people will help you.

If you’re keen to do good, there’s plenty of other sites to read about too. Share your success stories in the comments!