This site took online registration and an indication of the site preference for VITA volunteers in Santa Clara County.  An unexpected result was that volunteers from other Counties used the form to sign up requesting help in getting to sites close to them.   A separate page was set up for such volunteers where the registration information was emailed immediately to the national VITA office.

This site proposes to expand this service of online registration to others interested in using such a service.   It is an offer to provide a limited number of SPEC IRS Relationship Managers this service for the next year.  The website for the next season is currently being redesigned and expected to debut on or around June 15, 2008 for the next year.

What you may expect from this service:

• communicating dates, times and locations of training sessions and site operating hours on the web as they change to avoid printing and mailing them or e-mailing them individually to each volunteer
• immediate email notification of volunteers signing up providing the contact and personal information you need, including site and volunteer job preferences, and special skills; this would be the information you otherwise received from this website that goes through the National VITA office and is routed to your Territory Manager and then to you
• periodic updates of the information in a spreadsheet  that can be imported directly into Microsoft EXCEL (to save you having to enter volunteer information into spreadsheets yourself from paper registration forms, email messages, and hastily scribbled personal particulars from garbled voicemail messages, thereby avoiding errors in data entry)
• an opt-in mailing list of email addresses of interested volunteers throughout the year, so that at any particular time,  when you need to contact them, you can contact them all through that mailing list
• forwarding email address(es) to your real email address so that your real email address is not on the web where it could be harvested and end up on unwanted email lists, but which provides a means for potential volunteers to ask for further information.  At your option, the forwarding email address can be changed when you start getting too many spam emails, or be shut off completely without exposing your real email address or telephone number on the web unless you choose to do so

What is needed on your part:

• an indication of interest as soon as possible so that the next version of the software system to  support multiple counties can be designed and tested before deployment for the next season
• putting the URL of this site on flyers and other communications as a place to obtain more information about VITA in your specific area of influence or interest
• putting the URL of this site on your voicemail and other email communications as the place to get detailed information on volunteering  (by doing so in the past, the Relationship Manager reduced the number of voicemail messages she had to respond to, and after getting the same question repeatedly, provided a detailed answer to which further inquiries could be referred)

Who can benefit from this service:

• Relationship managers and those who personally are responsible for recruiting and staffing a large number of local partners and site coordinators, and do not have the support of a large national or regional non-profit that handles recruitment and training through their own outreach activities.
• Relationship managers who wish to increase their productivity by reducing repetitive data entry tasks
• Relationship managers who are proficient with computers and have working knowledge of spreadsheets and information storage and retrieval.  They should recognize when a spreadsheet should be used for data manipulation and when it should be used for presentation, and not try to force fit a presentation format into doing data manipulation, and who understand at a gut level what this sentence is saying.
• Relationship managers who are willing to try out prototype software that helps their productivity and do not expect product quality customer support
• Relationship managers who measure their success more by what they accomplish rather than the time and effort they put in to follow established processes and procedures
• Relationship managers whose names, addresses and email addresses can be validated through IRS offices or the VITA national offices
• Relationship managers who need to deal with 50-400 volunteers and 10-35 sites.  Below these numbers, paper and pencil is adequate, and the service has not been tested above these numbers
• Relationship managers who recognize that it is their responsibility for managing volunteers, and that by using automation to reduce tedious time-consuming data entry tasks, they have more time to improve the quality of interaction with volunteers, instead of expecting technology to take over the complete responsibility for managing volunteers.

This service was developed over several years in cooperation with a Relationship Manager in Santa Clara County in California, part of San Jose Territory, who directly managed the efforts of 20-30 site coordinators in the county and was also responsible for several other counties.