The hospital began using VSys One as their Volunteer Management Solution in 2009. In 2013 they added VSys Live to provide their volunteers with a portal for self-management. They continue to expand their use of the product as they learn new features. Additionally, they use the VSys Kiosk for check-in and out. A total of six volunteer management staff use the system which is hosted by VSys.

Online evaluations (a paperless process) yield higher response rates than a paper process, and paper processes are more labor intensive to implement as they involve staff scanning forms, the decision was made to use online applications. They designed performance evaluations by configuring a certification, adding all of the fields needed for volunteers, the supervisors and volunteer management staff to complete. One very important field was a text field for the supervisor's email address because this field allowed for creation of automated notifications whenever a volunteer completed a performance evaluation.

VSys Live Applications

They created two dynamic VSys Live applications: one for volunteers to complete and one for their supervisor to view and complete. Each of these applications contained the fields from the certification that were applicable to them (i.e. fields that only the volunteer needed to complete were added only to the volunteer application), as well as standard fields needed to identify the volunteer (e.g. name, kiosk ID). In the case of the supervisor evaluations, the volunteer fields were shown so that the supervisors could they could see the volunteer's responses, but could not edit them.

Accessibility

Client decided that only volunteers with at least 30 hours of service would be candidates for the performance evaluation. Using an automated process, the performance evaluation certifications were added to each eligible volunteer. They also created an Intellilist that captured the names of all volunteers who had this certification in their profile; removing them if the volunteer had a completed performance evaluation application (meaning they completed the volunteer portion of the performance evaluation). Within VSys Live, a visibility rule allowed access only to those volunteers on this intellilist. Once they completed the application, the volunteer would no longer have access to complete the application.

Notifications

After each volunteer successfully finished their self-evaluations, a notification went automatically to the supervisor with each volunteer's name, profile picture and a hyperlink for the supervisor to finalize each volunteer's evaluation. Towards the end of the process, a report could be run of performance evaluations that were missing supervisor evaluations, and that used to send a gentle reminder to to the supervisor.

Implementation

After all those pieces were in place, the client simply sent out emails to the volunteers who were assigned the performance evaluation certification and asked them to log into VSys Live to complete the evaluation. As planned, supervisors were notified whenever one of their volunteers completed a performance evaluation.

To "turn off" the performance evaluation process for that year, they simply disabled the applications associated with the performance evaluation and turned off the notification subscription. This left the application and subscriptions in place for use next year, along with all of the history for every volunteer and supervisor within the volunteer profiles.

Metrics

The project goal was to a 60% participation rate; they managed to get a 74.7% response from volunteers and supervisors!