You may be using the SportsEngine Sports Management system and maybe considering using their DIBS process to help manage your volunteer bond program. Before you go ahead and implement this for your entire league, you may want to learn about how far you can go with the DIBS process. You’ll want to learn the full details – what it can do and what it cannot do. Read the rest of this post to learn everything you need to know about the DIBS features and what’s involved.
Managing a volunteer bond program for a youth sports league can become a full-time job, that is, if you are not using the right software tools. There are a myriad of tools available to manage your volunteer bond program. Deciding on what tool to use really depends on your program and how extensive your volunteer needs are. For example, if you only have a need to sign up volunteers, then you’ll only need an online signup sheet. There’s Signup.com and Signupgenius, both of which have free versions. But if you want something to better manage your volunteer bond program, let’s dig further..
The SportsEngine DIBS feature set allows you to do the following:
- Post available volunteer posts to all parents and families.
- Have parents claim the volunteer post they want, i.e. submit a ‘dib’ on that position.
- Have your volunteer coordinator verify,, using a paper sign in/out sheet from wherever the volunteer post was completed, whether a parent completed their volunteer jobs.
- Track the volunteer hours or credits families have to determine whether they have completed the league volunteer requirements.
Great, right? Well, not so fast. Because there’s more involved in managing a volunteer program.
First, different volunteer jobs have different parameters. Here’s a common scenario, let’s use a hockey tournament (or any sport tournament or meet). In this example, you’ll have:
- different volunteer positions
- different shifts, with varying Start and End times
- different groups of volunteers (for specific-division volunteer jobs)
- different # of people needed per volunteer job
- different rink, or field, or diamond locations
The above would mean hundreds of different variations. And with DIBS, you will need to create a ‘DIB’ for *every* one of these variations, that means you have to create hundreds and hundreds of volunteer ‘DIBS’ just for one tournament. Here are just a few of the many limitations:
There is no way to create multiple shifts under the volunteer position so that you have far far less job postings. In the DIBS way, parents see everything – the hundreds of volunteer job postings even though only a small number of volunteer positions apply to them. There is no way for parents to add a 2nd or 3rd person to the volunteer ‘dib’. Let’s say you and your spouse want to sign up for the same volunteer position so you can get double the hours. There is no way for parents to do that in DIBS. It does not provide your parent volunteer leaders (who may manage the volunteers on their respective teams) with a way to see who has volunteered for their volunteer positions. With the DIBS process, you can only “push” notices to parent volunteers, you do not have two-way communication. Also, within DIBS, all the volunteer positions are shown in one long list, there is no way to categorize, filter or group related volunteer positions into segments. Parents are forced to have to slog through all your postings just to see the ones that are applicable to them.
An important task in managing a volunteer bond program is to keep track of parents who have completed their volunteer hours so your league finance people can either reimburse the parents’ volunteer bond or send a family their check back to them. From the perspective of your parents, their expectation is after they complete their volunteer hours, they will be reimbursed for the volunteer bond they paid or have their volunteer bond check returned to them. With DIBS, there is no functionality to keep track of families to whom you have reimbursed (or returned their check back to them for their volunteer bond). This is another thing you need to track manually, either in Excel or Google sheets – read: more hours spent going back and forth from your spreadsheet to DIBS. For a typical youth sports league with, say 500 players (so about 400 families), this will take anywhere from 10 to 15 hours per week for your volunteer team. The ideal alternative is a volunteer management system that provides an easy way for you to keep track of families and the status of their volunteer bond. So, either you spend dozens of hours of work per month manually tracking volunteer bond status with your DIBS process, or you can use an automated tracking process with a volunteer management system.
Another very important aspect of managing family/parent volunteers is making sure parents know the status of their volunteer hours, either mid or at the end of the season. It’s not enough to say that parents can see their volunteer hours in their DIBS interface. For one, the inference is that your volunteer coordinators have verified parents’ volunteer hours. And two, parents may or may not look at their DIBS interface. As we all know, being a parent is all-consuming, so if you have no way to inform parents of the status of their volunteer hours, it’s almost a ‘gimme’ they are not going to know the status of their volunteer hours. DIBS has no functionality to inform parents of the status of their verified volunteer hours. Ideally, you want to have a software tool that will automatically monitor families’ volunteer hours and notify those who are low on volunteer hours and are in danger of not meeting the volunteer bond requirements. A full-featured volunteer management system will provide this.
While at first glance the DIBS feature set (it’s not accurate to call it a volunteer management system) seems as if it can handle your league’s volunteer bond program needs. However, with the multiple important – time-intensive tasks – you need to do to manage your program, there’s much more to consider. In this post, we’ve covered the big considerations: 1) the ability to categorize, condense and create volunteer positions that are easy to manage and easy for parents to sign up for, 2) tracking the status of families’ volunteer bond and, 3) the ability to automatically notify families of the status of their volunteer hours.
When you start to more fully consider what your volunteer coordinators do to manage your volunteer bond program, you’ll start to realize you have many more important needs than what the SportsEngine DIBS feature provides.
Ok, now that you know the DIBS limitations and the problems volunteer coordinators face , you may be wondering how you can solve these problems. At SportsHelpers, we’re experts on youth sports volunteer management. Since we support dozens and dozens of youth sports leagues like yours, we’ve built up a deep knowledge base of best practices. We’re happy to provide a free consultation to help you with your problems. Our goal is to help every youth sports league – even if you don’t use our system. Contact us today for a free, no-obligation consultation, go to our Contact Us page and drop us a line.
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