Most volunteer software assumes one person is assigned to one thing. An art gallery does not work that way. The floor needs a headcount, the 10am school tour needs two docents, and opening night needs everyone you can get. Volunteer Ledger schedules by how many a shift needs, publishes the gaps, and lets volunteers claim the slots themselves.
The unit of an arts schedule is a slot that needs filling, not a person who has been given a job. Once the software understands that, the phone tree stops being necessary.
Every shift carries a capacity. Gallery sitting on a Saturday might need four, a weekday afternoon two, a school tour two docents, and an opening reception a dozen. The schedule shows filled against needed on every slot, so short coverage is visible at a glance instead of discovered on the day.
When volunteers claim slots themselves, the obvious failure is two of them taking the same last opening at the same moment. The capacity check runs as a single database statement at the point of claim, so the second person is told the shift is full rather than quietly overbooking it. That matters most on exactly the shifts everyone wants.
A volunteer sees open shifts in the areas of service they are actually assigned to. A front-of-house volunteer is not offered a docent tour, and a docent is not offered the gift shop. You control that by assigning areas on the volunteer record, and the schedule follows it without a second list to maintain.
Volunteers can see and claim shifts up to sixty days out, which covers a run of an exhibition and the events attached to it. Far enough ahead for people to plan around, close enough that the calendar is not full of slots nobody can commit to yet.
Arts scheduling is not an even weekly rhythm. It is a season of regular hours punctuated by nights that need three times the people, and then it changes when the next show opens.
Build a recurring pattern with an end date and it generates only the dates in that run. When the exhibition closes the shifts stop, instead of leaving a standing weekly slot on the calendar for a show that came down in March.
Recurrence can follow a day of the month or a position in the month, such as the second Thursday. Months that cannot honor the pattern are skipped rather than rolled forward, so a monthly slot on the 31st does not silently land on the 1st of March.
An opening, a gala or a festival day is a single shift with a large headcount rather than twenty separate entries. Publish it, let it fill, and watch the count rise. Anyone who has staffed an opening by group email knows the difference.
Reminder emails go out ahead of a shift on a lead time you choose, and a shift can override the house default when it needs a longer runway. Nobody sits down on Thursday to remind people about Saturday.
Handing volunteers the calendar is a real choice, and plenty of organizations want the coordinator to keep the pen. It is off until you turn it on, and it is two separate settings rather than one.
The first switch decides whether volunteers can log in at all. Some organizations want that so people can record their own hours, and nothing more.
The second decides whether signing in also means claiming shifts. They are deliberately separate, so you can hand out hour logging without handing out the schedule.
Staff can add, move and remove assignments regardless of what volunteers do themselves, and the schedule records who assigned whom. Self-signup reduces the phone calls; it does not take the schedule away from you.
A shift on the calendar is a plan. Hours are a record. The two stay separate, so a volunteer who signs up and does not appear has not quietly earned credit for the afternoon.
The whole product, described for museums, galleries and performing arts organizations.
Turning the hours behind those shifts into in-kind value for a funder or a board.
The same scheduling shaped around a performance run rather than a gallery week.
Taking applications on your own site and approving them straight into the roster.
Yes. Every shift carries a capacity, so a Saturday on the floor can call for four people and a school tour for two. The schedule shows how many of those slots are filled, and a shift that is short is visible without opening it.
The capacity check happens as one database statement at the moment of the claim, so only one of them can succeed. The second sees that the shift is now full. This matters on the popular shifts, which are exactly the ones several people reach for at once.
Yes, and it happens automatically. Volunteers only see open shifts in the areas of service assigned to them on their record, so a front-of-house volunteer is never offered a docent tour. There is no separate permission list to keep in step.
Give the recurring pattern an end date. It generates the dates in that run and stops, so when the show comes down the slots go with it rather than sitting on the calendar until somebody notices.
Sixty days. That covers a typical exhibition run and the events attached to it, while keeping the list to dates people can realistically commit to.
No. Self-signup is off until you enable it, and it is two separate settings: one allows volunteers to sign in at all, the other allows signing in to include claiming shifts. You can hand out hour logging without handing out the calendar, and staff can always assign, move and remove people directly.
Start a free 45-day trial, build one exhibition's worth of shifts, and see how much of it fills without a single phone call.
