Today we’d like to introduce you to Kaylee and Lucy Williams.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
VolunteerLocal is a labor of love, and took root in a community that supported our efforts (and our people) every step of the way. Our story begins in Iowa.
VolunteerLocal was originally built by Brian Hemesath for the Des Moines Arts Festival in 2003 to help manage the 350+ volunteers used throughout the three-day festival. The software was deemed a success and spun out to be a stand-alone product because he saw the impact it could make. At that same time, the decision was made to give the product away to any non-profit in Des Moines. Brian’s major “a-ha moment” occurred in 2008 when the Hy-Vee Triathlon used VolunteerLocal to manage 1,600 Triathlon volunteers – believe it or not, they did this without us even realizing they were using our system.
At that time, the Hy-Vee Triathlon was the largest event to-date on our (very short) client roster. This led to an introduction to USA Triathlon, an organization that gave us a leg-up into the national marketplace and is still a proud partner to VolunteerLocal today. In 2009, VolunteerLocal became an official business. We introduced two, and then three paid versions of our product shortly thereafter.
My name is Kaylee Williams, and I’m the President of VolunteerLocal. In 2012, I was hired as our very first paid intern. I had just graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in English, a mountain of student loan debt, and the haughty, bright-eyed confidence of a young person who didn’t have very much to lose (and it’s true, I didn’t). VolunteerLocal, a cause-driven for-profit startup company, plucked my heartstrings and ignited my ambition. I bought a car, signed a lease on my first real apartment, and hauled my cat and my (few) worldly belongings to Des Moines, Iowa.
In 2015, we hired Lucy Williams, our current Director of Operations. I met Lucy in Dublin, Ireland back in 2010 when we were both still students. Our paths crossed again years later, and I knew when she interviewed with us that she was the right person to help grow this company.
Lucy and I spent the next two years building a loyal customer base and stellar reputation in the industry. We hired a team and opened our Chicago offices in February of this year; we now office out of a cowork in Logan Square called Ampersand. Our little company powers the volunteer programs behind thousands of events all around the world, right here from the windy city.
Since that very first festival in 2003, VolunteerLocal has become the premiere volunteer scheduling and registration platform for events of all types around the world. This year, we pushed over 1.6 million unique volunteers through our system. Some of our largest and most well-known customers include IRONMAN, Lululemon Athletica, the Marine Corps Marathon, the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras (the largest LGBTQ event in the world) and Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Lucy: I think it’s been a smooth road for the most part, and that’s largely due to Kaylee and I’s working relationship. We’ve been a team for almost 3 years now, and from the beginning we both had a genuine passion for the work we were doing and a strong belief in our product. While there have of course been times where our visions didn’t completely align, there’s always been a genuine mutual respect for each other’s ideas, and a willingness from both of us to take risks and try out different approaches.
Some of our biggest struggles I believe have come from the fact that there’s no written path for us – we get to decide where we’re going and how we get there. But that’s also been one of our biggest strengths, and what makes this job so exciting and rewarding.
I think there’s also something to be said for two young women who are calling the shots. It’s not a position either of us had experienced in the work field before. I personally had experienced my own share of sexism and sexual harassment in previous jobs, and I was in a lot of roles that offered limited mobility. It was really a shock to the system to come into this workspace where I got to make executive level decisions, discover my strengths and weaknesses, and mold my job around what I did best.
Being in the tech world as a young, female-led company is a rarity, which becomes especially apparent when we go to conferences and can visually see how little our age and especially our gender are being represented. But I think that it’s because of these things that we’ve been able to bring our experiences to the table and build this company from a unique vantage point.
Kaylee: I’ll answer this question from the business development and growth perspective. Our challenges, especially in the beginning, weren’t unique to most startups: awareness, brand recognition and (of course) sales were our core focus. We experimented with different marketing approaches, continued building out our product to better meet the needs of specific verticals, and even increased our prices to help us along the way. Even before Lucy joined us, I made my fair share of mistakes and misfires – but like any good startup, you learn from those experiences and you iterate.
Today, we’re in a much different phase of our growth, and our challenges have evolved as well. We’ve established a loyal base of renewing customers and a stellar reputation in the marketplace, thanks to the support methodology that Lucy crafted when she began here at VolunteerLocal. Our focus is still top-line revenue (increasing our portfolio of business), but now we have a team to manage, international customers to support, and ever-increasing demands on our technology/development pipeline. We are scaling, and so creating efficiencies, identifying leaks and improving conversions are top-of-mind as we push forward.
All of this being said, I think it’s important to touch on tenacity when we talk about our challenges in the world of entrepreneurship. We’ve had some real setbacks along the way – expensive marketing campaigns that didn’t pan out, employees who have quit after just a few weeks, key accounts that didn’t renew, etc., but I like to think that Lucy and I are both pretty tenacious people, and we always believed in the broader vision of what we were building towards. Tenacity is a hugely understated quality, and we now actively hire for (and celebrate) tenacity in all its many forms.
VolunteerLocal – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
VolunteerLocal is an online volunteer scheduling platform that cuts out the “middle men” (Excel, phone trees and sharpie markers, to name a few) by completely automating the volunteer sign-up process. Our system works with events of all sizes and types. We feature a wide array of essential tools for coordination teams, including a mass communication platform, a two-click volunteer report, and a custom-built questionnaire that can capture any information the event or organization may require.
Our simple interface is innovative, and (most importantly) hassle-free for volunteers: no accounts, no passwords, no fuss. This means happier volunteers, which often results in higher volunteer retention rates, year-after-year.
Our overall mission is to empower great events to success by streamlining the volunteer registration and sign-up process. We believe our software makes volunteering easier and more accessible – which, as we have seen, increases the number of people willing to do it. This, of course, makes the volunteer coordinator’s job easier while at the same time keeping those volunteers happy.
We operate on a set of three core values:
We value the volunteer. Our innovative approach allows volunteers to select which jobs and shifts best match their interests, skills and availability. We’re all about putting the scheduling back into the hands of the volunteers.
We value the coordinator. VolunteerLocal enables event planners and volunteer coordinators to shift their focus from dragging names across cells on a spreadsheet to fundraising, field work or community outreach.
We value community. We’re proud to empower nonprofit organizations, sporting events and festivals alike, because these are the things that bring people together, strengthen communities, and make our world a better place to live.
Our business is run by this set of values, and while VolunteerLocal is not a non-profit company, we’ve built our pricing to be non-profit friendly. Moreover, we pride ourselves on stellar customer service and value our client relationships above all else.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
Lucy: I think we both feel that growing our team has been one of our greatest accomplishments so far. For so long it was just a couple employees working remotely in different states, trying to really launch this company from afar. Now, we get to walk into an actual office every day and collaborate with our co-workers. We’ve also worked to make sure that our team is diverse – while we’re still small, we all range in age, gender, religion, race, sexual orientation, etc. We have a really wonderful melting pot of voices who all get the chance to give their input and see their ideas actually set in motion. In my opinion, there’s no stronger asset for a company.
For me personally, I took over renewals and some of our financial forecasting, which is a pretty big deal for an English and Creative Writing major. It’s not an area that I ever thought I would or could be involved in, but VolunteerLocal has given me the opportunity to try so many different roles and build an expansive skill set that I don’t believe I could have gotten anywhere else.
Kaylee: Absolutely. Great companies are built on great people. Coaching and managing our employees has been incredibly fulfilling, in more ways than I could’ve imagined.
As a late-stage startup company, I’m proud that we can offer some really fun and unique perks to our employees while also covering benefits like health insurance and even life insurance. Everyone has flexible schedules (including unlimited vacation), we all get our own standing desks in a cool co-working environment in Logan Square, and we can provide free tickets to our employees and their spouses for festivals around the country.
As the leader of our team, I try to focus my mentorship on personal growth by understanding everyone’s unique career aspirations. In that spirit, we rolled out a “Professional Development Fund” initiative last year to support those dreams. I earmarked $500 for each employee to spend on themselves; this could include going to a conference, taking a class, or hopping a plane to meet a potential mentor – you-name-it. The goal was to help them enhance their (already impressive) skill-sets, and it’s now a permanent addition to the “employee perks” checklist.
Pricing:
- Discover Plan ($200/event or $600/year for unlimited events)
- Grow Plan ($800/event or $2,400/year for unlimited events)
- Conquer Plan ($3,000/event or $10,000/year for unlimited events)
Contact Info:
- Address: VolunteerLocal
3317 W. Fullerton Ave.
Chicago, IL 60647 - Website: www.volunteerlocal.com
- Phone: 800-909-7370
- Email: hello@volunteerlocal.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VolunteerLocal
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/volunteerlocal
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