I’m very fortunate to work for a company that supports its employees’ volunteer causes. From making financial donations to enabling employees to participate in volunteer activities, Communiqué PR fully embraces the spirit of giving back to the community.
One of the causes I’m passionate about is an annual volunteer trip I help organize to build houses in Mexico. Our group, “Club Baja,” isn’t an official 501(c)3, non-profit organization, but we’re simply a group of friends who rally our friends and family to do some good in the world.
We returned from our most recent trip in early May and over the course of 2-1/2 days, our intrepid group of 30 volunteers built two deserving families each a home and a latrine. It’s hard, manual labor, but completely rewarding.
As one of the trip’s organizers and its project manager of sorts, I’m tasked with managing a lot of moving parts—from coordinating with the non-profit organization on the ground in Mexico that helps us select the families, to managing the volunteer registration process. In the past I’ve used Excel to manage all of the trip details, but even this ubiquitous tool has its limitations.
There are four of us who organize the trip, and ensuring that everyone has access to the latest financial data or volunteer sign-ups can be challenging when you’re relying on emailing spreadsheets to distribute information and keep everyone updated. On more than one occasion, we’ve also run into the problem of document version control. There was definitely room for us to improve our operations.
Smartsheet is one of Communiqué PR’s clients, but long before we started working with them, we were using the spreadsheet-like tool to manage many aspects of the firm’s business operations and to collaborate with clients. Moving from Excel to Smartsheet was a natural transition for Club Baja and now we’re using it to manage most of the details required to pull off our annual trip, including:
- Tracking our expenses and income from registration fees and donations. Our organization runs on a break-even basis and knowing where we are financially at any given time is crucial.
- Storing documents such as registration forms, trip information packets and construction schematics.
- Tracking the inventory of tools that we keep in storage in Mexico so that we know exactly what we will need for our upcoming trip.
- Managing our volunteer information.
What’s great is that all of this is in one cloud-based location so that everyone involved with planning the trip can access the latest information and documents anytime, anywhere, and make changes if necessary. Plus, because Smartsheet is based on the familiar spreadsheet interface, using the tool is second nature.
Although Smartsheet is geared toward large companies or work teams, even small volunteer groups like Club Baja can use and benefit from enterprise-ready tools.