A handful of us have worked probono for a nonprofit group in Barcelona that feeds the homeless there. They have done this weekly for the past six years and have never missed a weekend run. They go out twice weekly (Sat & Sun). The entire effort is led by just two women.
They have been coordinating everything via a Facebook group and a Google Sheet thus far and there is a significant administrative burden weekly in coordinating these runs. We built them this app to reduce the overhead involved in coordinating volunteers: https://app.esperancabarcelona.com/
The app right now is at parity functionality-wise with their current Google Sheet-based method and we are in process of training them up and helping cut over their volunteers to use this new tool in place of the Gsheet.
Our vision for the future with this app is to make it so we can load up all 5k volunteers in the system and have it intelligently recruit people who haven’t volunteered in awhile and have it fill spots until all items are accounted for on each upcoming run. Ideally we’re going to make it so it honors their preferred contact methods and will cascade through each until it exhausts the recruitment attempt for that volunteer prior to moving on to the next volunteer (ie, try in-app notifications first, then if they opted for Facebook or SMS or email use whatever methods they’ve enabled to reach them and give up after X hours before contacting a new block of volunteers to fill the outstanding items).
We are very excited that this should alleviate much of the burden from the founders of this initiative, allow them to engage more volunteers and potentially open up new routes that help them serve more of the city in Barca. If there’s enough demand we are considering refactoring the app and enabling this to support other cities.
If you’d like to get involved in this (or other charitable projects) join us at CharityMakeover.org
PS. huge shoutout to @NoCodeJedi for his contributions to this app (most of the administrative screens are his handiwork).