Helper Helper Streamlines Volunteer Management

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Originally published at: Helper Helper Streamlines Volunteer Management - TidBITS

If you organize events that require significant numbers of volunteers, you know how much work it is to track everything manually in a spreadsheet. A better option is a volunteer management system like Helper Helper, which Adam Engst has used for over a year.

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Looks like a well-thought-out and well-designed relational database system.
It might be useful for managing volunteers at election booths for local government elections and associated preparations.

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Yep, it would definitely work well for that, since you could set up locations and shifts and communicate with everyone who signed up.

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I tried to find information about how much it cost, but their web site does not seem to indicate anything, and elsewhere on the net there are mentions of US$500/year, which is probably too much for the organisations I am thinking about which could benefit from this.

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As I understand it, there are too many variables for them to publish pricing, but yes, $500 per year is a fee that some nonprofits have been charged. The Helper Helper folks are very good about doing phone calls and in-person online demos of the system, and I imagine the corollary to there not being published pricing is that it might be somewhat negotiable.

The other way to look at Helper Helper is not as something that a particular individual organization might use, but as something that a larger umbrella organization might subscribe to and make available to other local organizations. For instance, here in Ithaca, we have an organization that makes grants and provides support for local nonprofits. I could imagine that organization subscribing to Helper Helper, getting one of their people familiar with it, and then providing it as a service for many other smaller nonprofits in the area that couldn’t afford Helper Helper or figure out how to use it on their own. Plus, that might have the secondary benefit of creating a larger local pool of volunteers that could be shared among various groups.