AI can collect volunteer availability, draft the roster, and chase the gaps. An animal rescue with 45 volunteers now builds its weekly roster in an hour instead of an evening.
AI can collect your volunteers’ availability, draft the roster, and chase the gaps, so the roster stops taking a whole evening. We work with an animal rescue with one paid coordinator and 45 volunteers, and the weekly roster used to take that coordinator an evening.
Volunteers walk dogs, clean pens, feed animals, and drive to vet visits, and every shift needs the right people. The coordinator built the roster by hand from text messages. That meant scrolling back through dozens of texts, working out who was free when, filling the grid, and then texting around to fill the gaps.
What we set up
We started with automating repeat work (the industry calls it workflow automation). An AI helper (the industry calls it an agent) asks each volunteer once a week in Slack when they’re free, and they reply in their own words. The AI helper records the answers in Airtable against each volunteer.
Then it drafts the roster from those answers. When a shift has a gap, it messages the volunteers who said they’re free that day and adds whoever says yes. The coordinator reviews the draft and makes the final changes.
The slow part was the chasing
The usual advice for a roster problem is to buy rostering software and ask volunteers to sign up for shifts themselves. That works for some groups. At the rescue, the slow part was asking 45 people when they were free and then chasing the gaps one text at a time.
So we put the asking where most volunteers already talked, which was the Slack channel they used to share news about the animals. Nobody had to learn a new app or remember a new password, and the AI helper did the chasing.
What went wrong first
Our first version posted every gap to the whole volunteer channel. Volunteers got a stream of messages about shifts they couldn’t do, and some of them muted the channel. Now the AI helper only messages the people who said they’re free for that shift.
Where the rescue landed
The roster now takes the coordinator about an hour instead of an evening.
The coordinator still makes the final call on who handles new animals. A new arrival can be scared or unwell, and matching it to the right volunteer needs someone who knows each person’s experience. A few volunteers still text instead of using Slack, so the coordinator adds their availability by hand each week.
If your roster takes an evening, get your AI Starter Plan and tell it where your week goes.
