Historic Milwaukee
400
Volunteers
3
Opportunities
950
Shifts
Interview with Grace Fuhr, Event Director
Historic Milwaukee, Inc. was founded in 1974, with the mission is to increase awareness of and commitment to Milwaukee’s architecture, history, and the built environment. Historic Milwaukee is the only nonprofit provider of guided walking tours in Milwaukee. Our signature events include Remarkable Milwaukee in February, Spaces & Traces in May, and Doors Open in September.
As a non-profit organization, Historic Milwaukee relies heavily on its volunteers in all facets of the organization. Volunteers conduct our walking tours as well as assist with research projects. All special events need volunteers in order to be successful.
Challenge
Grace explained that before using Bloomerang Volunteer, “We had a couple of volunteers who had excellent excel abilities create complicated spreadsheets to manage all our volunteer data. This system wasn’t super sustainable long term.”
Historic Milwaukee needed to find a robust solution that could manage a large number of volunteers. Once they established their requirements, Grace explained, “We started doing a lot of research on which volunteer management system could work for us and landed on Bloomerang Volunteer.”
Solution
Historic Milwaukee chose Bloomerang Volunteer as their volunteer management solution to streamline the complex management of their volunteers across multiple locations, events, and programs while reducing the administration time along the way.
KEY BENEFITS:
- Streamlined Volunteer Management
- Smart Scheduling
- Communications and Confirmations
Key Functionalities
CUSTOM REGISTRATION QUESTIONS
In order to capture important volunteer information, Historic Milwaukee utilizes Bloomerang Volunteer custom from questions.” For Doors Open we have four shift times over the weekend, which we made into a custom form question to capture volunteer availability for more streamlined shift scheduling,” Grace explained.
STREAMLINED VOLUNTEER SCHEDULING
To schedule volunteers, Grace explained that “Bloomerang Volunteer is great because once we have created the shifts and we start to plugin people in the system, and it lets us know if anyone is double booked. This feature has really been invaluable to use when scheduling our volunteers.”
SHIFT CONFIRMATIONS & NOTIFICATIONS
Historic Milwaukee uses Bloomerang Volunteer’s shift confirmations and notifications to ensure their volunteers show up at the right time at the right place. “Once our volunteers are plugged into the system, we send out an alert, allowing our volunteers to volunteer to confirm their shift. This feature has been super duper for us.”
VOLUNTEER COMMUNICATIONS
Historic Milwaukee uses Bloomerang Volunteer’s communication and messaging tool “We have used the message feature within Bloomerang Volunteer a bunch of times. It comes in handy when we need to reach out to individual volunteers to confirm information quickly,” explained Grace.
Conclusion
“Bloomerang Volunteer has really reduced a lot of administrative stress. We no longer have to recruit volunteers to help manage our other volunteers,” explained Grace.
“The greatest benefit of Bloomerang Volunteer was its ability to help streamline the entire volunteer recruitment and management process. It also helped us implement programs very efficiently, which made it easier on the back end for staff.”