Saint Werburghs City Farm

Airtable Volunteer Management System

Problem Statement

Desired Solution

Video Demo

As featured on the the Tech For Good South-West Podcast with Sona Mahtani from Power To Change and Alex Bowsher, Volunteering Manager at St Werburghs City Farm

Solution Architecture And Software Used

Key Features and Highlights

Manage waiting list applications

Submitted applications have a dedicated interface page where staff can view applications, leave internal comments on the application and set the volunteer status to active if they meet the critieria.

Quick access to volunteer data

The volunteer profiles interface page gives staff quick and easy access to volunteer data such as emergency contacts, which sessions they've attended and other personal data for the volunteer.

Calendars keep everyone on schedule

The calendar interface makes it easy to see which volunteers are coming up, and clicking on a calendar entry opens up important information about the sessions such as the register, who's attending and email lists for the volunteers.

Take registers and track attendance

Logging attendance and taking registers are important to record important business critical information and also track a volunteers attendance over the course of their time with the farm.

Reporting and Analytics

The reporting interface developed provides the ability to drill down into the data collected in application forms, during a project lifecycle and throughout a volunteers time at the farm. This is valuable to allow the farm to easily see trends and patterns in their data, and also quickly extract data for quarterly reports.

Automate repetitive tasks

Repetitive tasks such as creating registers, filtering out suitable and unsuitable application forms and remembering to complete monitoring forms are all handled using Airtable Automations. Staff can focus on their work rather than performing repetitive tasks like these.

GDPR compliance

Data privacy and correct data handling is essential when dealing with personal information. Airtable Automations will automatically keep track of when data needs to be deleted, and will perform the automatic deletion of data when it is no longer needed ensure the farm is always data compliant.

Project Lifecycle

Discover

Initial discovery phase to scope the requirements of the project and learn how the SWCF volunteering programme operates. Complex workflows were explored such as automatically generating volunteering sessions in advance and auto-populating registers to allow staff to see future session capacity.

Design

Architecture diagrams, database schemas and prototype interfaces were created to test different designs for the system from both technical and user perspectives. A smart technical solution was designed that was also functional and easy to use by the end user.

Develop

Development of the Airtable system commenced once the requirements were finalised. This included building the Airtable database, building the interfaces, configuring automations and writing scripts to handle the unique business workflows and requirements.

Deploy

On passing user acceptance testing the system was made live for prospective volunteers to submit applications through Jotform, and staff members at SWCF were given access to the Airtable interfaces to start incorporating the system into their daily workflows.

Post Deployment

Onsite Training

To ensure staff were comfortable and familiar with the new system, onsite training was provided to upskill everyone on how to use the new Airtable software.

Documentation

Documentation was written so that staff can self-serve at their convenience to refresh their knowledge on how to use the system.

Support and Maintenance

Direct support was offered if staff had any questions or queries alongside monitoring the system to ensure everything was working as expected.

Refinement and Improvment

After deployment there were additional workflows that needed to be added to the system. These were added in frequent updates of the system.

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