Optimizing non-profit operations by automating scheduling systems
Role
Project Designer
Timeline
Sep 2022 - Apr 2023
Team
UW Blueprint
1 PM
2 Designers
7 Developers
Skills
Design Systems
Interaction Design
Visual Design
Tools
Figma
Chakra UI
React
About my internship
Sistering is a non-profit based in Toronto, Ontario that aims to support homeless and transient women and transgender individuals by offering a variety of services including food, harm reduction, employment support, and drop-in programs. In just the 2019–2020 fiscal year, Sistering has experienced over 140,000 participant visits and served over 150,000 meals.
Over the course of 8 months, I worked closely with UW Blueprint and Sistering to develop a technical solution to be used by volunteers and Sistering staff. I designed a core admin and volunteer feature, along with a full-scale design system and design documentation to help ensure that the product could be sustained by the non-profit long term.
Emerging problem
Sistering’s current manual volunteer management process is inefficient and time-consuming, resulting in a large volume of dropped or unfilled volunteer slots
Sistering relies on recurring and one-off volunteers in each branch of their operations but faces many pain points when trying to
train, schedule, communicate
with, and otherwise organize its volunteers.
Understanding the problem
To understand the current state of the NPO, I interviewed administrative and non-administrative Sistering employees to analyze and uncover the most pressing issues impacting existing solutions. I learned about the experiences of multiple stakeholders involved in the overall ecosystem of this project, especially highlighting the interactions between admin to volunteer and admin to non-admin employee. I first broke down the existing volunteer management model to gain clarity on the roles of each stakeholder, and then summarized key insights to be addressed.
Each month, Sistering notifies volunteers of program opportunities to get involved with the NPO. Each program relies on the support of volunteers and non-administrative staff who oversee and engage with the volunteers. However, the are several issues that arise in coordinating volunteers across all of the program branches available. These issues stem from the following major friction points:
Lack of discoverability
Volunteers are notified of new postings through email. Given the load and complexity of shifts advertised, they often do not discover postings that are relevant to them in time. Situations arise where a volunteer cancels their shift and availability opens up to seek out another volunteer, but last minute updates go unseen.
Poor communication
Sistering admin manage shifts by emailing back and forth with volunteers and this system quickly becomes unmanageable. Administrative staff who schedule volunteers for programs must relay all communication again to the non-administrative staff responsible for that branch of their operations.
Inefficient management
Manually keeping track of volunteer availability and scheduling shifts through a spreadsheet is highly time-consuming.
This derived the basis of our project objectives,
To move forward with my ideation and designs, I used the themes gathered from research to derive three project goals to address the issues identified.
Conclusion
The designed solution was fully launched into the hands of Sistering in 2022 to help them revitalize their volunteer program after COVID-19. The project aims to simplify their volunteer management and scheduling for over 100+ volunteers and admins, so they can more efficiently serve women and trans individuals in Toronto.
Postings Manager
Administrative
staff can manage all active and historical volunteer postings directly from a consolidated database. Postings are created with a built-in template builder before publishing.
Previously,
emails were used to manage active volunteer postings and a cloud-based storage service was used to manually organize historical scheduling documents.
Volunteer Scheduler
Administrative
staff can assign volunteers who have expressed availability to shifts.
Non-administrative
staff can view volunteers scheduled for their designated program branch.
Previously,
schedules were created using a spreadsheet and distributed to non-administrative employees for program facilitation. Schedules were either distributed by email or in print.
Postings Browser
Volunteers
can view all active volunteer postings within the platform and filter for positions relevant to their interests and prerequisites. They submit their availability directly within the posting page.
Previously,
volunteer opportunities were sent to volunteers via email by Sistering admin. Volunteers would need to reply to the email to express their interest and provide their availability.
Shift Monitor
Volunteers
can view their assigned shifts for postings they submitted availability for within the platform.
Previously,
volunteers were notified of shift allocations via email by Sistering admin. Volunteers would need to email Sistering admin if a shift had to be cancelled.
