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SurveyMonkey Changed My Life: A Volunteer Manager’s Perspective

SurveyMonkey Changed My Life: A Volunteer Manager’s Perspective

Volunteer manager Laura Hamilton knew there had to be a better way to manage and schedule volunteers at George House Trust, the largest HIV Social Care Charity in the North West of England. So when her organization began to review rota management software packages to help manage volunteer rotations, she stumbled upon a solution that surprised her: SurveyMonkey, an online tool for collecting data for volunteer surveys. "Whilst exploring how it worked," Hamilton writes, "it struck me that with a bit of tweaking, we could set up a form which, rather than collecting feedback or evaluation data, would allow people to tell us their availability and sign up for shifts."  In this e-Volunteerism feature, Hamilton reviews her experience with SurveyMonkey as a rota tool, and explains why "it really has changed my life!"

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Sat, 10/16/2010
First article I read - technology fascinates me and I'm always looking for simple tools to do new tasks for which they weren't originally designed. I know that using one online service has advantages (cost, learning curve, familiarity), but you may also want to look at online forms software. Our agency uses www.formstack.com for online forms at a very reasonable price (with discount for charities). It's easy to use. It don't think it tabulates like surveymonkey but automatically displays data in spread sheet format and is tied to several 3rd party applications (i.e. PayPal). With multiple forms running, the best thing I think is that it's linked to Google Docs. It will dump data in real time into a google spreadsheet, and can send email notifications, etc. to whoever (and however many) people you choose. So each form can report to different people.