Volunteer Screening Made Easy with AI + Volunteer Passports

In our last newsletter we looked at how charities need a sector-wide approach to enable AI in the verification and screening process. But we didn’t look at how AI can be plugged into a volunteer passport to reimagine the process.

Let’s do that now.

Working With Unstructured Data

Most of the enterprise software systems you see today still largely involve trained humans tapping information into the system to get it working consistently.

The systems are heavily structured and don’t work well with nuance.

AI gives us the opportunity to work much better with the kind of unstructured data that the sector needs to work with.

Being able to work with unstructured data allows us to:

1. Match volunteers with opportunities in a way that go way beyond today’s filters and alerts
2. Run verification & qualification checks
3. Consider each opportunity differently and be trained on what would make a great candidate
4. Use the Volunteer’s Passport data to shortlist, accept or reject based on the overall content in the opportunity
5. Communicate with the volunteer automatically, but in a personalised way using information about the volunteer to formulate responses and ask for information that may be missing

What Does Nirvana Look Like?

Different strokes for different folks of course, but a good starting point would be charities receiving a pre-screened, prioritised list of candidates to take into the application process.

On the example shown below, rather than trawling through a pile of applications to check each one individually, the best matches are automatically screened and waiting for the human to pick it up and progress it. You’ll notice the AI has already given the volunteer percentage score to make this possible.

Clicking on a specific Volunteer then breaks down how the score was calculated - immediately showing the Volunteer Manager why an application was given a particular score.

In this case the AI has looked at the candidate and drawn the conclusion that the experience and availability of the Volunteer are the things to zoom in on during the interview.

So there’s a sneak peek at how much more efficient the screening process can be using artificial intelligence.

Next week we’ll get deeper into the application process and look for more ways to improve the volunteer experience.

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