Volunteer Allocation

KDub618

Hi All, 

I am attempting to find a solution for a specific manual task that is error prone and very time intensive - We need about 300 volunteers occasionally on short notice and need them across multiple cities in 20-50 specific locations (we do not know these specific locations until last minute). I have built a survey using Smartsheet forms to get the availability of these volunteers and their geographical preferences to minimize travel to these locations.

Is there a way to automate their volunteer assignment on smartsheet (i.e. calculate/map out the most equitable volunteer assignments based on the volunteers' availability and geographical preference)?

An ideal output would be a table that has assigned volunteers to a specific location and shift. 

 

Please let me know if you have any ideas or if anyone has leveraged Smartsheet to do anything similar. 

Thanks!

Andrée Starå

Hi,

Interesting use case!

Have a look here at the Smartsheet Maps integration. 

https://www.smartsheet.com/marketplace/apps/maps

Would that work/help?

I hope that helps!

Have a fantastic day!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

 

 

Paul Newcome

Using the Maps integration, you may be able to pull a distance value for how far each volunteer is from the location. You can then build that into a ranking system that accounts for availability as well. That part can get pretty tricky pretty quickly. I recently built out a ranking system that accounted for best fit based on a possible 27 choices, time of day and day of week. It ended up needing a couple of sheets. One for the ranking that had a Copy Row automation to another sheet to capture that data and the sheet that was set as the target for the Copy Row was used as the actual working sheet after the assignment.

 

I imagine building out something similar with the additional location criteria CAN be done, but it would definitely take some time and creative thinking.

Brianne Laird

Hi @KDub618

The new Healthcare Community Group is now live! This group is a space for all things Healthcare and your question sounds like a great use of a discussion post in the group. I encourage you to ask questions, share use cases and collaborate with others in your industry. We will also have some excited healthcare-related updates being announced in the Healthcare Community Group very shortly.

Please let me know if you have any questions about the new group!

-Brianne Laird