Holidays are the perfect time for families to give back. The best way to get your family into the giving (back) spirit is to jump in and volunteer your time, talents and (yes) money to the groups your kids already participate in!

• Is your kid’s scout troop organizing a food drive or his class Adopting a Family for the holidays?
• Has your PTO asked for help with its Book Fair, Winter Carnival, or Literacy program?
• Will you be joining in your Church’s annual Holiday Coat Drive or Community Potluck to feed the hungry this year?
• Will you be participating in an upcoming class party or field trip?

All of these activities have one thing in common, a parent leader organizing other parents (volunteers)…and traditionally, a slew of reply-all emails and phone calls coming your way asking for help and relaying details.

Make life simpler for both the parent volunteers and the organizer by suggesting they first check out VolunteerSpot.com. In one easy-to-use online coordination tool you’ll save the sanity of all the people involved, and feel good doing good this holiday season!

What is VolunteerSpot?

VolunteerSpot is a fantastic tool that lets anyone coordinate volunteers, and it’s great for parents to get more involved in all the groups their children already participate in! Permitting everyone easy access to a complete group volunteer sign up sheet, parents can quickly choose jobs and shifts to fit their busy schedules, or can sign up to donate supplies or food items with just a few clicks.

The whole system is designed to make it easy for non-techy volunteers to respond and participate, and volunteers don’t need to register on VolunteerSpot! Once a mom has signed up to help at the book fair, the system will automatically remind her of her shift by email before the event. (Talk about less stress for the event Chair!)

VolunteerSpot makes the planning process super easy for parent leaders too.  Activities can be created as ongoing schedules, like a team snack sign up sheet for the season, or as a stand-alone sign-up sheet for a single event or purpose, such as a class Adopting-a-Family for the holidays.

It’s very intuitive to plan a day, copy it for recurring events, and to manually add volunteers from a paper sign up sheet (with or without email addresses). Take a look at the demonstration video to see how easy it is.

For volunteer coordinators, this system will save you a ton of time and stress — not to mention eliminating all those pesky reply all emails! However, the most amazing outcome of using VolunteerSpot to coordinate volunteering is that you’re likely to wind up with more volunteers offering to help! Many potential volunteers are put off by communication overload and disorganization. Make it easy for people to help out and more people will volunteer to help!

This holiday season share the gift of VolunteerSpot with your favorite Room-Mom, Women’s Group, Coach and Youth Minister!

Carissa is affiliated with VolunteerSpot. However she was not compensated for this post.

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