A volunteer management system tracks who volunteers, what they are cleared to do and when they are rostered. What to record, which checks expire, and when a spreadsheet stops being enough.
A volunteer management system is the place a charity keeps everything about the people who give it time: who they are, what they have been checked and trained for, which shifts they have agreed to, and how many hours they gave. Small organisations run this from memory and a spreadsheet until the day somebody asks which volunteers hold a current background check — and nobody can answer without opening a filing cabinet.
Expiry dates matter more than the documents. A background check collected in 2023 and never reviewed looks identical in a folder to one renewed last month, which is exactly how an unchecked volunteer ends up on a shift with vulnerable people.
A spreadsheet copes while one coordinator knows everyone. It stops coping when several people need to see the same list at once, when checks start expiring at different times, or when volunteers should be able to see and change their own availability. The usual failure is not the spreadsheet itself — it is the five private copies of it that appear once more than one person needs the data.
Ettex Records covers this shape without charity-specific software: one table of volunteers with roles, checks and expiry dates, another of shifts with attendance, and a filter that answers the audit question in seconds. For organisations that also fundraise, it sits alongside donor management rather than duplicating it, and the hours total feeds straight into the annual impact report.
Not always. Below roughly twenty volunteers with stable roles, a well-kept shared table works. The trigger is usually expiring checks, multiple coordinators, or volunteers needing self-service.
What is necessary for the role and its safeguards, held with a lawful basis and a retention period. Background check outcomes need tighter access than contact details.
Record them at the shift, either by the coordinator confirming attendance or the volunteer logging their own. Reconstructing hours at year end produces numbers nobody can defend.
SLA management covers defining response and resolution targets, measuring them fairly, and handling breaches. How to set targets by priority, what to exclude from the clock, and how to report performance.
Mobile device management for small business does not require an enterprise platform. What to enforce on phones and laptops, how to handle personal devices, and what to do before someone leaves.
Patch management software finds missing updates across your devices and deploys them on a schedule. What the tools actually do, the process around them, and why patching fails for organisational reasons rather than technical ones.