Baptist Children’s Home of NC (BCH) is a faith-based nonprofit located in North Carolina with offices in South Carolina and Guatemala, amounting to nearly fifty locations across two states and one nation. Much of their growth can be attributed to their faithful pursuit of their mission to provide the highest quality of Christian services through foster care, adoption, residential children’s cottages, family care which helps to provide a safe home for single mothers that are in crisis, and support for families in crisis, aging adults and adults with intellectual disabilities.
Prior to switching to Golden, BCH largely left the management of volunteers up to the discretion of each location to manage. “People who already had full plates serving as directors and supervisors, caring for very specific needs for vulnerable people and children, were also juggling volunteers which made it difficult for everyone,” says Acting Director of Volunteer Engagement, Kristyn Butts.
Because there was no dedicated volunteer manager at each location, nor any way to utilize technology to manage volunteers, staff resulted in using paper waivers, calling volunteers for opportunities, and managing timesheets with paper forms.
“We wanted to have volunteers but often it was an added piece to somebody’s plate and it became a lot of playing phone tag. A volunteer would want to serve and then have to wait to be called back,” says Kristyn. “Additionally we had people signing paper waivers and those waivers were located in thirty different offices. If we ever had to locate one, it was really challenging.” she continues.
After their organization experienced a growth period coupled with an increase in locations and volunteers, it was apparent that Baptist Children’s Homes of NC needed to utilize a volunteer management platform to help continue to grow and meet their needs with excellence.
With fifty locations now managing and tracking volunteers, it was vital to begin leveraging a volunteer management platform to help scale their efforts. The team began searching for a platform and discovered Golden during the search.
“Much of my day-to-day is taking the needs and putting them into Golden. Now the local staff doesn’t have to make phone calls and search for volunteers. Those needs are publicly made and it’s been a huge turning point for us”, says Kristyn.
With the help of Golden managing their volunteers, Kristyn’s team can easily reach out to volunteers and thank them for their service which has steadily increased their number of returning volunteers.
Additionally, Kristyn can successfully pull reports on volunteer hours and the value of volunteer time to use when applying for grants and foundations.
“Many foundations want to know if we are using volunteers. We’re able to say, ‘yes, we’re using volunteers,’ and giving them real data to support that,” says Kristyn.
Since rolling out Golden ministry-wide to all their locations in July 2024, Baptist Children’s Homes of NC has engaged over 1,300 volunteers. Additionally, during this period, those volunteers have contributed a cumulative 6,300 hours of donated time. By the end of 2024, Kristyn expects them to hit $200,000 in value of donated time from their volunteers.
“Golden is able to help us with calculating the overall value of time. If we had to spend that money on services that the volunteers have provided, we could not afford it; it really is priceless.”
A priority for the BCH team was finding a volunteer management platform that would easily and seamlessly integrate with their CRM, Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge, as it was the preferred CRM by their development team. Being able to connect volunteer to supporter data was critical for their organization in order to map a volunteer to donor journey.
With the Golden - Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge integration, their collective teams were able to successfully push volunteer data into their Raiser’s Edge system and see a full, holistic view of their supporters. To date, 1,100 volunteers have been added to their CRM database in just six months time through the integration.
One of the key necessities for migrating to Golden was the ability of all volunteer types to be able to find and register for opportunities with the organization. Baptist Children’s Homes of NC engages volunteers of all ages – from elementary school children to seasoned adults – in service work with their ministry.
“Bringing a technology comfort level was something we needed to be cognizant of. I trained staff members at each of our locations, and they were able to assist volunteers with accessing the registration pages,” says Kristyn.
Kristyn brilliantly leveraged multiple channels of communication to educate and inform their supporters how to utilize Golden for their volunteer needs. She created several Facebook videos explaining the new process, how to access it on their website, how to register, and how to sign up for an account.
Want to learn more about how Baptist Children's Home of North Carolina has leveraged Golden in their volunteer management strategy? You can catch the entire conversation on-demand here!