Volunteer managers + robots

The life of a volunteer manager can be exhausting, juggling emails, calendars and phone calls often whilst on-the-go. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can streamline that workflow, enabling volunteering managers to focus on what truly matters -

The human side.

In our last newsletter, we discussed automating the volunteer screening process. Today, let's delve into the next steps: preparation and selection of suitable candidates.

AI offers us the tantalising opportunity to redefine our relationship with our inboxes and calendars. Combining data from your email, calendar, and activities, AI tools can generate predictive responses and set up meetings on autopilot.

How might that work in a Volunteering Context? AI will require us to rethink the UIs and underlying processes of today to enable:

• Communications in the context of specific activities
• Being able to define the boundaries what the AI should and shouldn’t perform on your behalf
• Automatically progressing candidates through email conversations and the scheduling of meetings, based on the parameters you set using natural language.

Let’s take a look at an example of how that might look in practice. A single UI contains all conversations relating to a specific activity. Within that, we’re able to see what’s been dealt with on autopilot and what requires a human eye.

See the image below, we’re able to supplement the base activity with some instructions to guide the AI through the last couple of days’ work before the activity.

In this case we’ve got the system to:

1. Prioritise booking interviews for this urgent activity
2. Reach out to volunteers who performed well in similar activities
3. Automatically seek more information from candidates

So there’s a couple more ideas on how the application, screening and interviewing process for volunteers can be greatly enhanced with emerging technologies that already exist today.

Let us know if you have any questions!