Why we built VolunteerPress, free volunteer management for WordPress, and how anyone can help build what's next.
Small nonprofits in Columbus, Ohio, the kind that feed and house people, run entirely on volunteers. Through Christians in Tech Columbus, a meetup I co-founded and organize, I’ve sat with a handful of them, and every one described the same thing. Not one of them had trouble finding volunteers. Interest was never the problem. What they lacked was a way to manage the volunteers they had: to cap a shift, keep track of who was coming, and communicate with everyone without doing all of it by hand.
Here’s what that looked like. Volunteers found the organization’s website and filled out a contact form. A staff member read each one and replied by hand. There was no way to cap how many people signed up for a day, so too many showed up or too few. Then every name got typed into a database on a separate platform the organization was paying for. None of it was broken. It was just human hours going to work that software should have been doing, and those hours came straight out of the mission.
A few of us from the meetup started working on it with them. We mapped what they actually needed, tried what already existed, and weighed what it would take to build something new. The free WordPress plugins were too basic or no longer supported. The good tools cost $50 to $300 a month, which is hard for a small nonprofit to justify when that money could go to the people it serves. And the all-in-one nonprofit suites a few of them already paid for do include volunteer scheduling, but every volunteer has to download an app and create an account to use it. The nonprofits wouldn’t ask that of someone who just wants to show up and help. What they wanted was simple to say and hard to find: signups on the site they already have, with limits, no new accounts, and no person in the middle.
The “site they already have” part decided the platform. Nearly six in ten nonprofits worldwide run their websites on WordPress, according to Nonprofit Tech for Good’s Global NGO Technology Report. Building for WordPress meant the fix could land inside something they already own. It also meant the work wouldn’t stop at Columbus. The same manual process is happening at small nonprofits everywhere, and most of them are on WordPress too. Solve it once as a plugin, and every one of them can install it.
That’s where VolunteerPress came from. I took version one on myself to get something real in front of them. Claude Code wrote the code, and I owned the architecture, the requirements, and the testing. Every change runs through automated tests and WordPress coding-standard checks (PHPUnit, phpcs, and JS lint) before it merges. Right now that’s 620 PHP tests and 21 JS tests. I’ll write a full post on how that workflow really looks. “AI-assisted development” sounds hands-off. It isn’t.
The most important choice in version one isn’t a feature at all. VolunteerPress doesn’t bring its own look. The signup form, shift list, and calendar inherit whatever the site’s theme already uses, so there’s nothing to style, nothing to configure, and no designer to hire. A volunteer signing up sees the same site they already trust, not a form that looks bolted on. That’s the reason it works on themes none of us have seen.
Version 1.0 went live on August 22, the same morning I gave the first talk on it at the meetup and ran a live demo that afternoon. 1.0.1 followed a day later with fixes from that first round of feedback, and that’s how it’ll keep going: the roadmap is driven by what the nonprofits we’re working with ask for. Volunteer hours tracking, which they need for grant reporting, is one of the first things coming. It’s free, open source (GPL), and self-hosted: you download it from volunteerpress.org, it updates itself from there like any other plugin, and the source ships in the zip.
The solo phase is over. VolunteerPress is an open source project with an in-person on-ramp: you come to an onboarding session, get set up on the codebase, pick up an issue, and own it through review. Anyone is welcome, and you don’t have to be part of the meetup to come. The first session is Saturday, September 5, at Improving in Columbus, running alongside the Christians in Tech Columbus meetup. Future sessions will be listed at volunteerpress.org/contribute.
I write every Thursday at blog.nathanspeich.com. For now that means building VolunteerPress: what shipped, what broke, and what we learned along the way.
If you run a nonprofit’s website on WordPress, download it and tell us what happens. Write to hello@volunteerpress.org. Especially if you’re the one replying to contact form submissions by hand right now.
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