Volunteers: Help or Hindrance?

Everyone in schools has opinions about volunteers. Blue Bear users have traditionally used volunteers to help out primarily with Fall Registration – and we’ve heard so many stories – some good, some pretty awful! Volunteers can make your life lots easier (helping to manage long lines of students and parents) or create extra work (they accepted cash, but entered it as a check, but then reversed it as a credit card – and now it looks like the student has REFUNDS for 3 yearbooks!). Oh dear!

The “volunteer” story that had the most profound effect on our software? It’s about the parent who was selling yearbooks and decided it took too much time to enter the student’s name into the computer at the time she took the money – so she didn’t. The Blue Bear user called us in horror the next day when she looked at a yearbook list with 120 yearbooks sold to “blank”. This resulted in a FAST enhancement: The “Customer Required” feature in Tracks Item Maintenance was born on the spot.

My opinion? Volunteers need to be trained with expectations established and supervised. The problems arise when volunteers are put into situations where they have to make decisions and don’t understand the consequences.