Saturday without a referee: who fills the rota?
Thursday evening, a quarter to nine. The secretary of a football club is sitting at a spreadsheet. There are six matches on Saturday, the clubhouse has to be open, and two referees have dropped out via the group chat. Between the messages about a lost key, there is one from a parent who would rather not work behind the bar anymore.
This is not a drama. It is the same work every week, and it comes down to solving a puzzle with people who do this alongside their jobs.
How the rota comes about now
Usually it starts with last week's rota. It gets copied, adjusted for the new matches and sent around. Then the replies come in: someone can't make it, someone swaps, someone forgets to answer. Who is still keeping track of how many shifts a volunteer has already done this season? Usually nobody, until someone says it isn't divided fairly.
On top of that come the odd jobs. A recruitment call for the youth tournament, a reminder that a VOG (certificate of conduct) is about to expire, an overview for the board. Each item takes little time. Together they fill one evening a week, and that evening is unpaid.
A calculation, with your own numbers
Assume you spend three quarters of an hour a week on the rota itself, half an hour on the follow-up work after cancellations, and half an hour on calls and overviews. That is a good hour and three quarters. Over a season of forty weeks, that comes to seventy hours. That number is an assumption, not a measurement: fill in how much it is for your club. Only then does comparing make sense.
Calculate in hours, not in euros. A volunteer who spends seventy hours a season on rotas does not have those hours for training, contact with parents or the youth tournament.
What an agent takes over
The Volunteer Coordinator role creates fairly divided bar, referee and driving schedules, fills gaps, writes recruitment calls per job and keeps the VOG overview with expiry dates up to date. In the Thursday evening example, that means: the agent lays the rota alongside who has already done how many shifts, proposes a distribution, and for the gap that remains prepares a recruitment call with the day, the time and what is expected of someone.
What it does not do: contact people itself. What goes out to your members is your decision.
Why you approve an outcome, not an intention
A lot of software asks for your approval in advance of an intention: "I am going to fill the rota and inform the volunteers." You can then only hope that the execution matches what you had in mind. With a rota, it goes wrong in the details. Has the father who already worked twice last week been scheduled again? Is the call written in a tone that suits your club?
With Stilops you first see a test run. You see the rota as it would become, the call as it would read, and what would be sent. Only when that is right do you approve it. If you don't approve it, nothing has gone out. Approving remains human work, even if it costs a few minutes you would rather not spend. That is a choice: it makes the system slower than an agent that sends things itself, and for anything that goes to members and parents, you will find that justified.
What it costs, and what you get in return
The Volunteer Coordinator costs 99 euros per month, excluding VAT, and includes 40 tasks per month. An extra task costs 2.50 euros. One rota for a weekend is one task, a recruitment call is one, updating the VOG overview is one. Work out how many tasks your club has per month: often you stay well under 40.
It is then not about the 99 euros. It is about the question of whether that Thursday evening stays yours or not.
What you can do tomorrow
Even without Stilops, a fixed routine helps: for one week, write down how much time the rota and everything around it costs you. Also note how often a gap is only noticed on the last day. Those are the two numbers you can base a decision on.
If you want to see what such a test run looks like, try the demo without an account. There you see what an agent would do, before you approve anything.