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By Lisa Ciota, Class of 2020, Education Guide

Just imagine:  You’ve been using the same software operating system for many years.  It works OK. It does the job intended, and who has time to research and identify alternative operating systems when there’s so much else that needs to get done?  Then, one morning, you wake up and are told:  “We’re terminating the software operating system you’re using.”  And, it gets worse.  You have less than 9 months to get ready and it’s going to happen during your busiest time of year. Ugh!

But wait.  This isn’t hypothetical.  It really happened. To us.  To the CAC.  We knew the Volunteer Matters scheduling platform was dated and would eventually need to be replaced.  Still, we were taken aback in February, when Volunteer Matters told us our scheduling platform would be shut down on September 30 of this year.

Good thing we had a team of aces in place to jump in and accelerate the process of researching, identifying, testing and implementing a new scheduling platform.  This “A” team included: Lori Nelson, Mark Purdome, Kelly Manteck, Cole Christian and Jared Miller with support from Caroline Duda and Maureen Waller.  Together, the “A” team benchmarked and evaluated several different scheduling systems.  Once Better Impact was identified as a possible solution, they researched and tested the platform to make sure it would work for us.

As their confidence grew, the team developed an implementation plan to transfer existing content and data from Volunteer Matters to Better Impact, organizing that information in a logical and coherent manner, developing and sharing training materials – both print and video – as well as testing Better Impact with a volunteer trial group.  The “A” team also scheduled “office hours” so docents and volunteers could connect with someone to answer questions and help coach them through the Better Impact site.

Then our launch date came on August 10.  Some 200 people logged in that morning to select their October schedules.  Things went very smoothly with only a handful of people reaching out with questions that morning.  By all accounts, the Better Impact implementation has been a great success!

Here’s some of the feedback received:

• “Great system, very intuitive and easy to navigate. The tutorials are very helpful.  Thanks to the team for selecting and implementing a new system so quickly.”
• “I have successfully logged on to Better Impact. Thanks for the follow up and for everything you do for CAC!”
• “… you should feel very proud of what you’ve accomplished with the implementation of Better Impact. It’s so easy to use, the app is great on my phone and iPad; I’m all around a happy user. Many congratulations to you and your team, and good luck this weekend.”
• “I viewed the videos last week and they were very helpful,”
• “Thanks so much for your help on Friday. The Saturday sign-up was a breeze.”
• “I just signed up for my tours for October. Worked really well. Thanks for all your help on this. Thanks.”
• “Thank you all for the hard work.  I LOVE IT.”
• “BRAVO! For the wisdom to customize a tool that works!!! So many aspects of this are an improvement. Thanks to all who had a hand in this selection, customization, end-user testing, installation and activation. Of course, it wouldn’t have been so easy without the training modules, and it was the one-on-one responses to questions that made the difference. This morning, I was able to sign up for 4 October tours … and then recognize that I had messed up on some dates and “remove” some; I then selected a better schedule on more suitable dates and continued from there. In the end, I was able to use “copy/paste” to pick up my own final schedule and print it out (for August through December as of today). Thank you more than you can imagine.”

Congrats to our “A” team!  Add your own comments in the comment section below.

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