Charity: from Framacalc to Kreneau
A charity in Paris that distributes food, some twenty volunteers, and two slots a week for the kitchen and the outreach rounds, planned several weeks ahead. To know who would be there, it used Framacalc, Framasoft's collaborative spreadsheet.
The time spent updating the spreadsheet was not the main problem. The problem was that not everybody managed to sign up.
The starting point
Framacalc is a good tool: free, open source, no account needed, run by an association whose work is valuable. For a charity, it was a coherent choice, and there is nothing to hold against it as a spreadsheet.
On the organising side, it took at least five minutes a week to keep the table up to date. But that is not what made the charity change.
The trigger: the phone
Several volunteers could not sign up from their phones.
This is not a question of goodwill. A spreadsheet is not designed to be filled in with a fingertip: you have to zoom to aim at the right cell, scroll a grid sideways, type your name while the keyboard covers half the screen. On a computer it is trivial. On a phone it is a real obstacle, and the phone is often the only device to hand at the moment of signing up.
In a charity, that kind of obstacle tends to carry a quiet cost. A volunteer who cannot sign up does not necessarily say so: they ask somebody to do it for them, or they give up.
What changed
The charity replaced its table with a Kreneau sign-up sheet. The two weekly slots are presented as a list: you open the link, tap "Sign up" on the slot, type your name, confirm. No account, no password, no grid to navigate.
The result fits in one sentence: everybody managed to use it, with no training at all.
"Several volunteers could not sign up from their phones. Today everybody uses it, and we did not have to train anyone."
The charity's chair
That is the point that matters most for an organisation that runs on volunteers: nobody needed to be trained before they could start signing up.
Signing up people who are not online
Another aspect was much appreciated by the charity: being able to sign other people up, in particular those with no internet access.
How it works is simple: when signing up, you type a name, and nothing requires it to be your own. A volunteer can therefore book a place for someone who let them know by phone or in person. That person appears on the sheet like any other sign-up, and the team knows they will be there.
One practical tip if you sign several people up in a row from the same device: the name field carries over the last name entered. Check it before confirming each sign-up.
The limits, put plainly
On one point, nothing has changed compared with Framacalc: the sheet runs on trust. Anyone who has the link can edit it or remove a sign-up, and there are no access rights to manage. Framacalc did not let you protect part of the table either: the only option was a read-only link, which also prevents signing up.
That is what lets anyone sign a third party up without asking permission. If you need to control precisely who changes what, neither tool is the right one.
The sheet also keeps no participation history per volunteer, and sends no reminder before slots. For twenty volunteers and two slots a week, those are not gaps. For an organisation tracking hundreds of volunteers across a year, with chasing and history, a full platform like SignUpGenius is a better fit. Our comparison between SignUpGenius and Kreneau helps you choose between the two.
What other charities can take from it
- Test signing up on a phone, not on your computer. That is where most volunteers will do it, and that is where the obstacles show up.
- Look at who is not signing up. A tool that suits the most confident people can quietly exclude the others.
- Plan for sign-ups by proxy. Some people will never be online, and they are part of the team too.
- Identify the real obstacle. Here it was not first of all the time spent keeping the table up to date, it was access: as long as some volunteers cannot sign up on their own, the rest matters less.
Going further
A climbing club made a comparable move, for different reasons: the time spent every week, and members who could no longer open the sheet. Its move from Google Sheet to Kreneau is told here.
If you also use Framadate for your meetings, there is no reason to change: a date poll and a sign-up sheet do not do the same job. The difference is explained here. And to see how a sheet is structured before creating your own, the standard structure is described here.
Your volunteer slots are already set? Try the sheet below, then create your charity's own.