Pollinator Project Rogue Valley (PPRV) is seeking qualified volunteers to help us identify and install the most suitable programs/applications on our website to provide two important features to will improve interactions with the public and our volunteers:

1. A public calendar of events that we offer and/or participate in, sometimes two or three a month. The event would include a link to a registration/payment page, as applicable. This public calendar would be highlighted in our monthly newsletters and included as links to Facebook and Instagram. Currently, we share events via our e-newsletter, The Pollinator Times, on social media, and our website. We have about 1200 people signed up to receive the e-newsletter, and another 3K follow us on social media.

2. A volunteer portal to communicate with volunteers about upcoming events, activities, and other ways to get involved and provide them with a way to sign up for specific tasks. One goal would be for volunteers to see who else is volunteering. Can the app notify volunteers of new activity in the portal, i.e. a new event is added? A second calendar of volunteer-only events would be excellent.

The deliverables would be the identification of the possible programs/applications, assistance with the installation of the features onto our website (WIX), and training PPRV volunteers, as needed.This is a good project for you because, for somebody who knows what they are doing, this seems a pretty straightforward and “easy” project. We are a great group of folks (all volunteers!), and would truly enjoy working with and learning from an expert in this field. Not to mention that the Taproot volunteer(s) would receive huge amounts of gratitude and appreciation from many people in our growing organization!

Truthfully, we are growing faster than our too-small core of volunteers can keep up with. Management of projects, programs, people, and activities is growing both in scope and number, and the old ways of doing things are slowing us down. Both of the features outlined above are concise in scope and fairly straightforward but will help streamline our processes and hopefully attract new volunteers and members of the public to our mission. We want to grow our team and our reach. Having a better way of managing communications with the public and our volunteers will help us grow and better achieve our mission of increasing the numbers of people knowledgeable about and engaging in the growing of native plants to help save our native pollinators in one of the most diverse bioregions in the world.

Read more about our vision, mission, value, and programs, and access our strategic plan on our website here: https://www.pollinatorprojectroguevalley.org/about_us

We currently use Google Calendar for internal communications with our core team. Once we understand how to create, add, and maintain a calendar of public events, we will install it as a new page on the WIX website. We make updates to the website several times a month and can easily add links to the calendar from other pages on the website and social media sites.

We currently have about 30 long-term volunteers with varying degrees of technical knowledge. Volunteers are needed at different times to support 1 or more of our 5 programs. We communicate via email, and sometimes, e.g., for our annual plant sales, use a Google Sheet to list out all of the many tasks. Not everyone is comfortable with Google Sheets and/or reads the emails.

We think everyone will be excited about a new and better way of communicating. Once we know which is the best volunteer portal and how to maintain it, it seems that it should be simple to add that link to the WIX website

2023 is winding down, and it is amazing to look at the spreadsheet of all of the events we have hosted and participated in over this year. Our Pollinteers make them happen, and we want to make it as easy for them as possible to learn about, connect, and learn how they can support our mission.