Engage©
Engage - Volunteer Management©
Engage is a sophisticated and comprehensive volunteer management system.
It gained its roots managing long and short term volunteers on Rakiura, Stewart Island in 2012.
Engage now manages volunteers who contribute to a myriad of conservation projects and activities across New Zealand.
It has been modified to comply with the Department of Conservation’s standard operating procedures for volunteer management.
Comprehensive Management
Many 'off the shelf' solutions primarily solve the marketing and communication aspects of volunteer management. Without providing a tool for co-ordination staff to handle the vast, varied and repetitive tasks of supporting the volunteering activity and the tailored information needs of the volunteer.
A dynamic online manual offers quick access to relevant help text and examples, based on the layout being viewed. This removes any need to go searching...
Engage is different. It offers the full package - end to end.
Online registrations through to evaluation reports, with everything in between.
Business Accountability
It's important to know if your organisational resources are providing the results you require.
A suite of customisable charts and numerical data outputs are available within Engage.
These help you track over time the conversion of volunteer effort against individual Activities or any larger scaled Projects you are managing. Alongside these options are many standardised reports.
Accounting departments love to crunch numbers... but they love to see the trending numbers of 'Work Day Equivalents' of volunteers even more!
Being able to quickly see the number of repeat volunteers growing over time shows that your volunteers are being well communicated with and feel valued. Likewise the charts showing growth in the numbers of separate events they have taken part in, and what Types of Activities they were. All incredibly useful management information to steer your volunteering ship in the right direction.
Efficiency & Standardisation
By providing a feature rich end-to-end management tool to support your co-ordination staff, your organisation benefits from internal efficiencies as well.
Many volunteering tasks are repetitive. Whether they are repeated weekly, monthly, annually, it does not matter. Having all the 'grunt' work streamlined is a huge time saver and ensures consistent information is passed onto the volunteers in a timely manner.
Health and safety documentation is crucial for many organisations, so including the relevant paperwork for field staff and/or direct to the volunteer themselves cannot be overlooked. Defining SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) documents and attaching them to Project Masters or individual Activities is one way Engage achieves this.
Standardisation & Communication
There is often a lot of paperwork or email communications, many with attachments, that all make up the total volunteer experience. And each of these need to be repeated for every volunteer offering their services, and for each and every Activity they participate in.
It all adds up to be a complex job ensuring the right information is passed along to where it needs to be: the volunteer, the activity leader, the project supervisor. All needing different tailored specific information, in a standardised format. Allowing for flexibility if and when required.
It takes a super human to manage 'micro' level data across all these aspects.
Let Engage be your superhero...
Templates for time based email communications ensure nothing is missed.
Visual prompts display the status of communications.
Rework is removed when dynamic emails can be constructed to individualise communications.
Documents can be reused across repeat activities.
Promotion & Growth
Growing your volunteer base assists you to achieve more.
A stylish and very simple to construct newsletter, with HTML email outputs are just one way Engage can share your volunteering opportunities.
Online Registrations, and established links with other prominent volunteer sites will help get your opportunities noticed. VolunteerNZ and SEEKVolunteer have API connections used by Engage to publish your activities.
No rework/re-keying is required. You just select which ones you wish to publish... EASY...
In the case of the NZ Department of Conservation, their volunteering pages are populated with Engage data through a client customised automated update process.
And as above in 'Business Accountability', statistics about the increasing volunteer numbers, their collective hours/days, repeat activities and the types of activities they take part in, are all recorded to track growth.
Volunteers
A volunteer's resource is a gift.
And volunteers like to feel acknowledged/valued for the work they freely provide. Personalised recognition emails can be generated for discrete segments or the entire population within Engage at anytime. The history of tasks and effort contributed by each and every person is recorded. Their personal details are kept secure, only displaying relevant information on any reports or paperwork that is truely required.
A large number of selectable attributes, skills, licences, interests can all be recorded and searched upon. This allows for specific volunteers with matching abilities to be communicated with, when seeking volunteer placements.
Review & Monitor
Engage offers online evaluations (personal or anonymous) to allow volunteers to express their thoughts and rankings about their experience. These are summarised with easy visual indicators to assess each activity and overall project. Full detail or individually selected feedback reports are available to view / print / email.
These can be automated to email to the activity/project supervisor.
The suite of customisable charts allow you to explore trends of volunteer instances. Eg: comparing types of activities volunteers are taking part in, to the number of instances they return to contribute to.
Activities
Activities and Volunteers are the core of Engage.
Activities are designed to be re-useable, customisable and most importantly very easy to manage. Integration throughout Engage ensures rework is eliminated.
Volunteers
Volunteers and Activities are the core of Engage.
Engage Volunteer management offers a comprehensive array of attributes that can be recorded and searched upon.
Client testimonial ...
We use the Engage volunteer management system in our offices in the top of the South Island.
We went from shuffling excel spread sheets to having a secure site to hold our volunteers details, the tools to match volunteers skills and preferences to our volunteer work opportunities, tools to be able to report on volunteer effort and contribution and the ability to produce a smart volunteer newsletter by drawing on the opportunities already saved in the database.
Engage helps us to work more effectively and provides us with the tools to help manage our amazing bunch of dedicated volunteers.
Sally Leggett - Volunteer Co-ordinator, Department of Conservation NZ