Google Translate, FTW!

Today has been a fascinating and fun experience. 

We have narrowed down our recommendations for volunteer management software to two candidate applications that we feel are the closest fit for the Junior Achievement's workflow: Volunteer Squared and Volunteer Matters. Like any off the shelf solution, both have gaps between what JA needs and what is available, but they are full featured enough for us to start the evaluation.

Daneiele (bottom left)
and Rogerio (bottom center)

We have two evaluators - Rogerio and Daniele. Both are experienced administrators for Junior Achievement. Both have limited English language vocabulary. Darren and Annette and I have *extremely* limited Portuguese. 

So we have communication issues. Fortunately for all involved, everyone is excited and engaged about picking a new tool for JA.

Conceptually, everyone understands what we need to do, but it is a little confusing as we have to play two different roles to evaluate the software - the volunteer and the system admin.

The tasks that we set up are pretty basic for today - we start in the admin role and we create a new volunteer record (as opposed to a volunteer self-signing up via the website). 

Next we need to create and schedule events. The two events will be a training class at the JA office and then a program at a participating school. Unlike, say, a paint-a-thon, where volunteers can just show up and participate in the event, for JA, you must be trained before you can go to the school and teach a class. So there are qualifications and scheduling dependencies that need to be considered.

Easy tasks, right? Create a volunteer record, create a couple of events and schedule them. 

Enter the language barrier. Fortunately, Google Translate is just a wonderful tool for making the world a smaller place. It really is magical. Even when it doesn't get the words quite right (um, practically always), the ideas come across pretty clearly. So we have been going back and forth, typing in our words and phrases, simplifying them when needed to make the idea easier to comprehend and in general having a blast while we are doing it. It is a slower process than we estimated and we cannot monopolize Daniele and Rogerio's time as they have other responsibilities, so we will do what we can in the time we have.