FIne-grained Volunteer Management

Question

There is a need to manage neighbor-helping-neighbor volunteers in Senior Villages (and similar). Senior Villages are mutual-support organizations, often without paid staff, which provide social, cultural, fitness, and household support to enable their members to stay in their homes and age gracefully. Many Villages have a volunteer clearinghouse for things like rides to the doctor, watering plants while the homeowner is away, friendly welfare check-ups, shoveling snow, etc. This is different from volunteers for fixed roles at fixed events. Maybe Civicase with an enhanced client/service match function would work. It is similar to a storefront, but for services, not products. It's actually kind of like Uber or AirB&B, where distributed producers provide distributed services through a clearing house.

What we need is:

• volunteer registration, with tags for skill set, certification
  (background check, CPR, etc.), and availability, including vacation
  absences.
  • service requests, including: type of service, time of service, locations (transport needs start and final destinations; round
    trip?); special concerns ("needs help with stairs"; "must transport
    wheelchair/walker"), etc.
  • provider/service match (including volunteer's past workload), query, and assignment
  • mutual notification of client and provider
  • confirmation, evaluation, and "lessons learned" feedback from both client and provider; time sheet logging
  • performance reports for evaluation and recognition of outstanding performance ('cause we ain't paying the volunteers money)

Thanks for any help.

Does anyone know of a module to do this, or can suggest one that might be modified? There are commercial apps that do some of this (Ride Scheduler, Club Express), but not all and which are not readily customizable the way Civi is. Without a staff, we need to embed as much paperwork and process expertise in the system as possible. As the population ages, but doesn't die or go into care, this is potentially a big market.

Answer 1

despite the detail provided it is hard to presume the workflow involved here but having looked through the Ride Scheduler tour I would approach building the core of this around Drupal Webform-civicrm and Activities and Views.

The webform approach gives the flexibility for capturing the info that civi core lacks.

The use of Activities or Webform delivers the notification process.

Views can be used to give displays of current 'requests' in a more user friendly way.

At this point I don't see CiviCase being necessary but that is because I am probably not imagining the workflow very well.

The one gap I see compared to RideScheduler is the automated call to the driver. But an SMS should be do-able without extra effort using eg CiviRules

Answer 2

Because of the requirements for specific skills and roles (i.e. driver, availability) I would recommend giving the excellent CiviVolunteer extension a look. It would definitely give you some of the functionality, can be built upon, and the developers are always happy to hear from people who want to expand it!

Petednz's suggestion of CiviRules for sending an SMS is a good one here. CiviRules doesn't support this yet, but it would be very easy for a developer to add this as an option :)