The City of Fort Collins is located in northern Colorado and is regarded as an epicenter for outdoor adventure, craft breweries, and recreational activities. With around 170,000 residents, Fort Collins is the fourth-largest city in Colorado and has a vibrant and growing volunteer base.

The city boasts 49 natural areas covering over 40,000 acres, 600 acres of parks, and 20 miles of hiking and biking trails. The city of Fort Collins runs a robust volunteer program with 2,800 active ongoing volunteers, nearly 600 of whom serve in the natural areas. Volunteers contributed 146,071 hours to Fort Collins in 2017, equivalent to 73 full-time employees and providing a value of 3.8 million.

Fort Collins Natural Areas (FCNA) only has three full-time and two seasonal staff members to manage over 437 programs per year with 12,400 public attendees. In addition, they oversee 585 active volunteers, 1,214 one-time volunteers, and countless sites between natural areas, community programs, special events, and school field trips.

FCNA used several different methods to track hours, registrations, and logs to manage such a large quantity of volunteers, participants, and sites. Unfortunately, current efforts were inefficient and ineffective, from an antiquated volunteer management system to the old school pen-and-paper method.

Volunteer coordinators for the natural areas found they were spending too much time aggregating data and not enough time engaging their volunteers. So they began their search for a comprehensive volunteer management system that could check off all the items on their list.

FCNA researched existing software like Volgistics, Altru by Blackbaud, and Eventbrite, as well as internal custom-build solutions. However, they struggled to find an all-in-one volunteer management system that met their needs.

Key priorities for a volunteer management system included:
1. Volunteer and participant registration and management
2. Self-reported site visits
3. Unlimited administrators, volunteers, and participants without an additional cost
4. Reporting customizable to the organization as a whole or each individual area

Squarei Technologies was awarded the contract, and Offero was created as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product. The system operates under a “grant back” program, uniquely allowing organizations to collaborate and drive the development of the product.