How Immigration Voice Coordinates Hundreds of Volunteers with Teamup
Two days, three hundred meetings, and several hundred volunteers come together smoothly.
About Immigration Voice
Immigration Voice, a non-profit advocacy organization headed by a US Citizen, works on behalf of legal, high-skilled future Americans in the United States. They do their work primarily by petitioning the legislative and executive branches of the US Federal government to find solutions to high-skilled green card backlogs.
The Challenge
Several times a year, Immigration Voice coordinates volunteer-driven Advocacy Events. These events bring hundreds of volunteers together, for one or two days, to participate in small-group meetings with lawmakers. There are about 200 meetings in a single day, with 4–5 people involved in each meeting.
Immigration Voice has several specific needs for a calendar tool that will enable them to coordinate these large, complex events in a streamlined way.
- They need a calendar that can easily contain hundreds of meetings, or calendar events, in a one or two day period.
- They need to be able to restrict each volunteer’s calendar view, so an individual only sees the meetings they are scheduled for rather than the entire list of meetings for the day.
- They need to update the calendar events in real time, so that volunteers can quickly find the information for their assigned meetings, usually on their smart phones.
- They need to be able to include file attachments or URLs for some meetings.
In addition, they need to coordinate all these meetings in an extremely tight window of time. Multiple “meeting coordinators” need to be able to work with the calendar to assign meetings to volunteers.
Why Teamup
Teamup worked with Immigration Voice to develop a solution that works for their particular needs.
Individual Sub-Calendars for Volunteers
Immigration Voice set up one sub-calendar for each of the volunteers, and disallowed overlapping events; that way a volunteer can only be scheduled for one meeting at a time, and no one is double-booked.
Customized Calendar Links for Volunteers
Each volunteer got a unique calendar link with read-only access to their individual sub-calendar; that way, they saw only their scheduled meetings.
Big-Picture View for Coordinators
The people coordinating and assigning the meetings could all work with the master calendar for a big-picture view. They are able to access, view, and modify all the sub-calendars as needed. By using filtering options, they could easily sort and see only the relevant sub-calendars for each meeting which makes it easy to view the availability of the selected volunteers.
Multiple Participants for Each Meeting
Since Teamup allows one event to be assigned to multiple calendars, the meeting coordinators could create one meeting event and assign it to several volunteers.
Include Details and Files
The calendar coordinators can use the event fields to include the names of all people going to the same meeting, and the location or room number. They could also upload files or links for each event as needed.
Update and Notify
The meeting coordinators can easily change details and meeting assignments from the master calendar. Each volunteer can always see their meetings in real time whenever they open the calendar on they mobile devices. Optionally, it’s possible to set up email notifications to be automatically notified of changes on their individual sub-calendar.
The Benefits
The team at Immigration Voice was able to use Teamup to quickly set up the schedule of meetings, communicate with volunteers, and make the Advocacy Event flow smoothly.
The event was a huge success and thanks to the Teamup app everyone was able to stay on track. Many of our volunteers stated, and I quote, “Teamup was the highlight of the day!” and ”The app was a great help, can’t imagine our next event without Teamup.”
Originally published at blog.teamup.com on May 15, 2018.
