--- title: "Hospital Auxiliary Volunteer Reminders | $9/mo" description: "Flat $9/mo scheduled shift reminders for hospital auxiliary volunteers — gift shop, information desk, blood drives. No app, no account to create." canonical_url: https://volunteerreminder.com/for/hospital-auxiliaries md_url: https://volunteerreminder.com/for/hospital-auxiliaries.md last_updated: 2026-08-18 --- # Volunteer reminders for hospital auxiliaries and guilds **A hospital auxiliary runs on volunteers in their 70s and 80s — the gift-shop cashier, the Tuesday information-desk regular, the escort who walks people down to radiology, the sewing guild that has met on the same morning for thirty years. VolunteerReminder sends each of them a scheduled shift reminder as an ordinary text or email for a flat $9/month. Nothing to download, no password, no account to create, and no ads.** We build VolunteerReminder, so we are not a neutral party here. Every competitor number below comes from the vendor's own pricing page, and further down we say plainly which auxiliaries should buy a full volunteer-management system instead. One thing to get out of the way first, because it decides whether the rest of this page is for you: VolunteerReminder is the reminder layer for an auxiliary that runs itself. It is not the hospital's volunteer-services system. If the requirement is background checks, TB and immunization records, HIPAA training expirations, or mandated hour reporting, skip to the section on when you need a real VMS — we will name the right tools rather than pretend to be one. [[TOC]] ## Why can't some of our volunteers finish the software sign-up? Because the software assumes an account, and an account assumes a smartphone or a working email address — which a meaningful share of auxiliary volunteers simply do not have. That is not a guess about seniors. It shows up in the reviews of the platforms themselves. In a Capterra review of Civic Champs, a coordinator writes that some of her volunteers "are older and only have a home phone and no accessible email" and therefore "cannot complete any form of onboarding." Another reviewer on the same product notes that most of her volunteers "are Senior Citizens" whose reluctance toward computers "is naturally high" ([Civic Champs reviews on Capterra](https://www.capterra.com/p/248947/Civic-Champs/reviews/)). That is the whole problem, written by someone who was not trying to sell you anything. When the tool requires every volunteer to self-serve — create a login, install an app, keep a profile current — the people who most need a reminder are the ones who fall out of the system before they ever get one. The auxiliary president ends up keeping the real schedule on paper and calling people the night before, which is where she was in 1998. ## Do our volunteers need an app or an account? No, and that is the entire product decision. Volunteers never install anything, never set a password, and never log in. You keep the roster and the rotation; we send the reminders. A gift-shop volunteer gets a plain text on her flip phone on Wednesday evening: "Reminder: gift shop, Thursday 10am–1pm. Reply if you cannot make it." That is it. No "tap here to confirm in the app," no "log in to see your schedule." For a roster whose average age is north of 70, removing the account is not a convenience. It is the difference between a tool that gets used and one that sits idle after the first month, while the vice president goes back to her phone tree. Carrier registration (A2P/10DLC) — the compliance step that gets do-it-yourself texting from a personal phone or a Google Voice line silently blocked — is handled for you at the platform level. You never register a brand or campaign yourself, and there are no carrier or number fees on your bill. Messages go out over our registered platform number, and any volunteer who replies STOP is unsubscribed across the platform. ## What about volunteers who only have a landline? This is the crux for an auxiliary, so we will be straight about it. **Text reminders reach any phone that can receive a text, including a basic flip phone.** No smartphone, no data plan, no app, no email address. If a volunteer gets texts from her grandchildren, she can get a reminder from you — and that covers the large majority of the "not very techy" members of your roster. What a text cannot do is reach a genuinely landline-only volunteer. No software changes that, and any vendor claiming otherwise is bluffing. For those few people the honest answers are the old ones: put them on email or calendar reminders if they do have an inbox, print the month's rotation for the gift-shop binder, or have the shift captain make a quick call. VolunteerReminder still schedules and tracks them alongside everyone else; it just will not pretend a text landed on a phone that cannot receive one. Most auxiliaries end up with texts for nearly everyone and a short call list for two or three holdouts — a long way from a workaround account for your whole senior cohort. ## What do the platforms that market to hospitals cost? They are priced for a hospital department, not for a self-run auxiliary with a gift-shop till and a fundraising account. VolunteerHub, which sells itself as volunteer management software for healthcare organizations, starts at **$143/month for Plus** and **$288/month for Pro**, both billed annually and both carrying a setup fee whose amount is not published; Enterprise is quote-only ([VolunteerHub pricing](https://volunteerhub.com/pricing)). Credit where it is due: automated text reminders are included in every VolunteerHub tier, so the gap there is not texting. It is the price and the portal model — an auxiliary buying VolunteerHub is buying a volunteer portal your members have to log into. WhenToHelp, which counts hospital auxiliaries among its customers, is priced by headcount from **$16/month for 1 to 10 helpers up to $117/month for 151 to 200**, with no setup charge. They advertise email and text notifications / Urgent Text Alerts as included in the band price, with no published per-message rate or cap; their comparison-grid reminder row still reads "Email schedule reminders" ([WhenToHelp pricing](https://whentohelp.com/pricing.htm), grid fetched 2026-08-18). Volgistics is the other long-standing incumbent here, and it markets a volunteer scheduling system to hospitals directly. Its VicNet volunteer portal is optional, so it would be unfair to call it an app lockout — that is not the problem with it. The problem is scale and shape: it is a department-grade system of record, and an auxiliary that needs Thursday's greeter reminded is buying a great deal of machinery to get one text sent. | Tool | Entry price | Setup fee | Text (SMS) reminders | |---|---|---|---| | VolunteerHub | $143/mo (Plus), $288/mo (Pro), billed annually | Yes — amount not published | Included in all tiers | | WhenToHelp | $16/mo (1–10) up to $117/mo (151–200) | None | Email and text notifications as included in the band price; no published rate or cap; grid reminder row: "Email schedule reminders" | | **VolunteerReminder Deluxe** | **$9/mo flat ($90/year)** | **None** | **Scheduled shift reminders for up to 60 volunteers, two texts per shift — not a per-message credit pack** | None of these are bad products. They are volunteer-management systems built for organizations with paid staff, compliance obligations, and reporting to do. If a reliable reminder is the actual thing your auxiliary needs, paying department money to get it is the trap this page exists to name. ## What VolunteerReminder sends, and what it does not Worth being blunt about, because auxiliaries ask for this the moment blood-drive season starts. **VolunteerReminder is not a bulk-text tool and not a replacement for your phone tree in an emergency.** What Deluxe buys is *scheduled shift reminders*. Every shift on the rotation sends each assigned volunteer a text before it starts — two per shift on Deluxe, which covers a day-before nudge and a morning-of "you are on the information desk today." It is not a bulk-text plan and not a per-message credit pack. If what you want is to blast 90 members at nine at night about a canceled event, that is a mass-texting product and we are not one. If what you want is for Thursday's gift-shop pair and Saturday's blood-drive check-in crew to remember without the president chasing them, that is exactly the job this does. ## How does this fit an auxiliary's rotation? It is built for exactly the recurring pattern an auxiliary already runs. You set the standing schedule and roster once, and the reminders repeat on their own: - **Gift shop** — two or three shifts a day, largely the same people each week, with a day-before text and a morning-of nudge. - **Information and welcome desk** — a standing weekly rotation and a short reminder the evening before. - **Patient escort and way-finding** — the wheelchair and walk-along shifts that leave the lobby short the moment one person forgets. - **Book and magazine cart, and courtesy deliveries** — light, frequent, easy to let slip. - **Sewing guild and workroom** — a monthly or twice-monthly meeting that lives on the same reminder rails as everything else. - **Blood drives** — a one-time schedule with a week-ahead heads-up, because those shifts need real preparation, plus a morning-of reminder. - **Fundraisers** — the bake sale, the uniform sale, the fall bazaar, the gala check-in table; heavier crews, more one-off slots, more people who signed up two months ago and have not thought about it since. Deluxe sends two reminders per shift. Pro raises that to three and adds the substitute finder: when someone drops a slot, it texts a batch of your bench — you set how many people are in a batch and how long it waits — and the first YES takes the shift. If nobody answers, it moves to the next batch. It does not blast the whole roster, which is the point when your bench is 80-year-olds who do not want their phone going off for a shift somebody else already took. ## What does it cost, and what is included? Flat pricing, sized for an auxiliary treasury: - **[Basic](/pricing) — $3/month ($33/year):** email and calendar reminders for up to 40 volunteers. Fine if your members are all reliably on email — which, for most auxiliaries, is the assumption that breaks. - **[Deluxe](/pricing) — $9/month ($90/year):** scheduled text and email reminders for up to 60 volunteers, two texts per shift. It is not a bulk-text plan. This is the plan a senior-heavy roster actually needs, because the text is the part that gets read. - **[Pro](/pricing) — $19/month ($190/year):** up to 150 volunteers, three reminders per shift, plus the substitute finder described above. Annual billing on Deluxe and Pro is about two months free. Every plan starts with a **30-day free trial and no credit card**, which is long enough to load one real month of the gift-shop and desk rotations and watch the reminders land before you take anything to the board. ## Do text reminders actually cut no-shows? Probably, and we will not hand you a "volunteer no-show rate," because there is no credible published one and anyone quoting a hard figure for volunteers is guessing. The rigorous evidence comes from healthcare, where appointment reminders have been studied properly. In one randomized trial in a pediatric clinic ([PMC5227159](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5227159/)), text-message reminders cut appointment no-shows from about **38% to 24%**. Treat that as a labeled analogy from a different setting — patients, not volunteers — and not a promise about your Thursday desk shift. But the mechanism is the one every coordinator already trusts: a message that reaches someone the evening before is the cheapest insurance you can buy against an empty chair. Whatever your real rate is, the empty slot is not free. Independent Sector values a US volunteer hour at **$36.14 for 2025** ([independentsector.org](https://independentsector.org/resource/value-of-volunteer-time/)), so a three-hour information-desk shift nobody covers is roughly $108 of donated labor the hospital did not get — plus the part that does not show up in dollars, which is a family standing in the lobby with nobody at the desk to ask. Our [volunteer no-show cost calculator](/tools/no-show-calculator) will price your own gap, no email required. ## When does an auxiliary need a real volunteer management system? When the requirement is credentialing and compliance rather than reminders. We would rather point you at the right category than sell you the wrong tool: - **Background checks, immunization and TB records, signed waivers, HIPAA and training-expiration tracking.** That is a full volunteer-management platform's job — VolunteerHub, Volgistics, or Better Impact — and it is precisely why those tools carry the accounts, portals, and price tags they do. We do not run background checks and you should not treat us as a substitute for a real screening process. - **Mandated volunteer-hour reporting.** If the hospital, a grant, or a service-hour program needs auditable totals, use a platform that logs hours as a system of record. We remind people to show up; we do not count what they did once they got there. - **500-plus-volunteer, festival-scale events.** That is event-volunteer territory and a different category again. In practice, plenty of hospitals already run one of those systems for the credentialing side — the volunteer-services office owns it, and it is not going anywhere. That does not have to be your problem. The auxiliary can keep its own gift-shop, desk, escort, and fundraising rotation on VolunteerReminder for $9 a month while volunteer services keeps its system of record. Many tools, one job each, is a perfectly good way to run an auxiliary. ## How do we get started? You do not have to move anything you already use. Keep the binder, keep the spreadsheet, keep the wall calendar in the gift-shop back room. Send us your rotation and your roster and we will help you set up the recurring shifts, or build it yourself in a few minutes — your volunteers do nothing at all, because the next reminder simply arrives as a text or an email. **[Start your free trial](/signup)** — 30 days, no credit card. Or compare the tiers first on [plans and pricing](/pricing). If your roster is senior-heavy or landline-heavy and you want a second opinion on whether this fits, email us how the auxiliary runs: [info@volunteerreminder.com](mailto:info@volunteerreminder.com). ## FAQ ### Do our older volunteers need a smartphone, an app, or an email address? No. Reminders arrive as ordinary text messages and emails — nothing to install, no password, and no account to create. A volunteer with a basic flip phone and no email still gets the text, which is the specific thing that locks senior volunteers out of account-based platforms. ### What about volunteers who only have a landline? A text cannot reach a landline, and no software changes that. You can still schedule those volunteers and reach them by email or calendar reminder if they have an inbox, print the rotation, or have the shift captain call. Most auxiliaries end up texting nearly everyone and keeping a short call list for two or three holdouts. ### Are the text reminders included on Deluxe and Pro? Yes. Text reminders are included on Deluxe and Pro as scheduled shift reminders (up to 60 volunteers, two texts per shift). It is not a bulk-text pipe. Competitors often charge per text. ### Can we use it to text the whole auxiliary about a last-minute gap? That is not what this is. VolunteerReminder sends scheduled reminders for shifts already on the rotation — it is not a bulk-text plan and not a per-message credit pack. For an all-hands blast, keep your phone tree or a mass-texting product. On Pro, the substitute finder handles the common version of that problem: when someone drops a slot, it texts a batch of your bench and the first YES takes the shift. ### How much does it cost compared with software that markets to hospitals? Basic is $3/month ($33/year) for email and calendar reminders and up to 40 volunteers; Deluxe is $9/month ($90/year) for scheduled text reminders for up to 60 volunteers, two texts per shift; Pro is $19/month ($190/year) for up to 150 volunteers with the substitute finder. Systems built for hospital departments start far higher — VolunteerHub, for example, at $143/month billed annually plus an undisclosed setup fee. Every plan has a 30-day free trial with no credit card. ### Is it HIPAA-compliant, and does it track background checks, TB records, or volunteer hours? No. VolunteerReminder is a reminder service, not a compliance system — it does not track background checks, immunization or TB records, waivers, training expirations, or mandated hour reporting. If your volunteer-services department needs that, a full volunteer-management platform such as VolunteerHub, Volgistics, or Better Impact is the right fit. Many auxiliaries use one of those for credentialing and us for the gift-shop and desk reminders. ### Do text reminders actually reduce volunteer no-shows? There is no credible published no-show rate for volunteers, so we will not invent one. The closest rigorous evidence is from healthcare: one randomized trial in a pediatric clinic found text reminders cut patient appointment no-shows from about 38% to 24% (PMC5227159). Volunteer shifts have not been studied that way, so treat it as a directional analogy, not a promise. ### How do the texts comply with carrier rules, and can volunteers opt out? Carrier registration (A2P/10DLC) is handled for you at the platform level, so you never register a brand or campaign yourself and there are no carrier or number fees. Messages go out over the platform's registered number, and any volunteer who replies STOP is unsubscribed across the platform. ## Sitemap See the full [sitemap](https://volunteerreminder.com/sitemap.md) for every public page.