A Survey on Volunteer Management Systems

Voluntary work is indispensable in nearly every area of today’s society, e.g., service activities in health care or emergencies. Not least because of this omnipresence of volunteering, already a plethora of volunteer management systems (VMS) has emerged, trying to support diverse volunteering processes and to deal with the broad spectrum and peculiarities of voluntary work. Thus, an in-depth understanding of functional commonalities and differences of VMS is urgently needed. The goal of this paper is therefore to provide an in-depth survey of existing VMS. For this, first, an initial attempt towards a reference model (RM) for VMS is presented, capturing their basic functional ingredients and interrelationships in terms of UML class diagrams. Second, the RM is operationalized by means of a set of evaluation criteria used to compare seven carefully selected VMS, thereby discussing their peculiarities and shortcomings. Third, lessons learned are provided together with research directions for future VMS.