Friends of
the Gardens.

Friends of the Gardens (FOGs) is a volunteer group at Western University in London, Ontario — Western staff and community members who, for nearly 30 years, have maintained the St. Mary's Cement Rock Garden on campus. More recently they established a native-species pollinator garden, growing most of the plants from seed in the campus greenhouses, and they run hands-on workshops and an annual plant sale. Like many volunteer groups, it runs on a small core of committed people carrying coordination that would overwhelm a paid team twice the size.

Volunteer scheduling, workshop sign-ups, plant-sale logistics, and garden work days were all done by hand — largely through email, a shared spreadsheet, and institutional memory held by a handful of organizers. It worked until it didn't.

Coordinator bottleneck

Onboarding new volunteers required individual follow-up at every step. Without a coordinator actively shepherding the process, interested people went cold. The workload concentrated in one or two people's inboxes.

Fragile infrastructure

Volunteer records, shift history, and contact information lived in a spreadsheet maintained by one person. There was no system for surfacing who was available, who had specific skills, or who hadn't been engaged in months.

Capacity ceiling

Programming ideas that would genuinely grow community impact were routinely deferred — not for lack of interest, but because the coordination overhead to run them didn't exist. The drudgery was the ceiling.

Automated volunteer onboarding

Replaced the email-and-follow-up onboarding flow with a structured intake process. New volunteers move through a consistent welcome and orientation sequence without a coordinator following up at each step.

Logging & volunteer records

Moved contact and participation data out of a single-owner spreadsheet into a shared, structured log — activity, hours, and engagement history captured consistently and accessible to more than one person.

Email notifications

Set up automated email notifications for the moments that used to depend on someone remembering — sign-up confirmations, upcoming work days, and follow-ups — so nothing falls through the cracks between meetings.

Better team meetings

Brought structure to how the team meets and tracks decisions: clearer agendas, shared notes, and follow-through on action items, so meeting time goes to the work rather than to reconstructing what was decided last time.

Shared documentation

Moved process knowledge out of individual inboxes and memory into shared documentation the whole team can reach — how-tos, role guides, and a single home for the things people kept having to re-explain. Collaboration stopped depending on one person being available to answer.

Communication templates

Built a set of reusable communication templates for recurring touchpoints: seasonal callouts, event reminders, lapsed-volunteer re-engagement. AI drafting tools were used to develop and iterate the template language quickly — reviewed and adjusted by the coordinator to preserve FOGs' voice.

Bespoke email drafts

Beyond the reusable templates, set up AI-assisted drafting of individual, bespoke emails tailored to specific volunteers — a personal thank-you, a tailored re-engagement note, a reply that reflects someone's history with the group. The coordinator reviews and sends; the blank-page effort is gone, but the message still reads as if it came from a person who knows them.

Volunteer retention

Used the new records and engagement history to help surface who hadn't been active recently and where people were dropping off — giving the team a way to prioritize retention deliberately rather than reacting once a volunteer had already gone quiet.

• Volunteer onboarding runs without a coordinator following up at every step
• Volunteer records and activity logged in one shared place — no single point of failure
• Automated email notifications keep volunteers informed without chasing anyone down
• Team meetings run on clear agendas with decisions and action items tracked
• Shared documentation lets the team collaborate without depending on one person's memory
• Communication cadence runs consistently without drafting from scratch each cycle
• Personalized volunteer emails drafted in seconds, reviewed and sent by a person
• Retention treated as a deliberate priority, with lapsing volunteers surfaced early

These outcomes describe the operational changes currently in place; quantitative measures will be added after the current phase is evaluated. The engagement is ongoing as of August 2026. A second phase — covering program capacity tracking and seasonal scheduling — is being scoped with FOGs.

Volunteers' personal information — names, contact details, availability — is exactly the kind of data that should never be handed casually to an AI tool. Where AI was used, it was kept to drafting and language work on non-sensitive content; volunteer records themselves were never fed into an AI system. Personal data stayed in FOGs' own shared, access-controlled tools, under the team's control.

Every AI-assisted output — templates, notices, documentation — was reviewed by a person before it went anywhere near a volunteer. The aim was never to hand judgment to a tool, but to take the routine writing off the team's plate while keeping a human accountable for everything that carried FOGs' name. Where a lighter, non-AI approach did the job just as well, MissionCAP used it.

No coordinator role was automated away. The goal at every step was to remove the parts of the job that didn't require a human — so the parts that do could get more attention. The coordinator still runs onboarding without spending hours each week on emails that can be handled by a form.