Changes are being made…
This is a long read. But I feel it’s needed so everyone understands why we are doing, or trying to do things differently.
In the past month the orchard has moved to take records from paper to digital. Everyone is feeling the change and everyone has their thoughts about it all. Today, after reviewing what has been done, and what needs to be done, and taking into account many suggestions for improvements, we are making some additional changes to the forms and processes.
If you don’t want to read more, here are the changes.
First, the ‘Sign Up’ form has changed by removing the safety requirement section. These are being moved to the ‘Check In’ form.
Second, a new ‘Sign Up’ form has been created for people who are entering multiple entries and was primarily designed for those helping others to sign in. It’s not exactly what I would like to see, but limitations of the web building application prevent me from doing more. This may change in the future.
Third, the ‘Check In’ form is being disabled from direct access at this time, and those who have ‘Signed Up’ will be sent a text with link to the ‘Check In’ form. (Yep, I can’t get rid of it due to reasons I mention below.)
There are other changes that probably won’t be visible to you as a volunteer.
Now onto the long winded stuff….
As background the orchard must meet several legal requirements. These come from
the IRS (they want to know who is working at the orchard and how many hours are being donated.)
the FDA who wants to make sure we are doing what is required to keep volunteers safe
the Church who wants to make sure we meet all legal requirements.
These are not optional. So to meet these requirements we try to design the user forms and datasets to comply with these. We also try to make the forms as easy to use as possible.
There are two datasets. One is the ‘Sign Up’ form which allows us to know how many have signed up for any day. The second is the dataset that contains all the legal stuff we need to have when audited. And we do get audited. This data set is the ‘Check In’ form. What has to be in this data set is the persons name, date served, and acknowledgment they have watched the safety videos. In the past we have used paper forms to do this, and a signature was needed.
Those requirements are still valid. But in place of a signature, the use of an electronic form submission is suitable for audit purposes. I was hoping to replace the ‘Check In’ form as we have been doing this last week. However, the powers that be are more comfortable with the actual volunteer filling out the form and submitting it.
Finally because it is so much faster and easier to audit digitally, the orchard is moving to having all documents in a digital system.
If you have thoughts, suggestions, questions, or improvements, please volunteer at the orchard and see me. I’m usually doing the parking.