Board of Pharmacy Specialties Efficiently Manages 2,800+ Volunteers with Lineup

The Customer

Founded in 1976, Board of Pharmacy Specialties (BPS) administers board certification and recertification exams to pharmacists, adhering to rigorous standards of testing to recognize more than 60,800 pharmacist certifications across 15 specialties. Doing its part to improve patient care, BPS strives to increase awareness of the need for advanced-level, board-certified pharmacists as key members of multidisciplinary healthcare teams.

As the organization moved from giving exams twice a year to continuous testing throughout the year, the need for a streamlined, accurate platform to control all volunteer activities while keeping up with increasing demands on its exam writers and other volunteer teams grew. They needed a way to recruit, vet, and evaluate board-certified pharmacist volunteers for exam writing and other tasks with greater visibility and efficiency.

The Challenges

BPS was fully dependent on surveys and spreadsheets to recruit and manage its volunteers. For every pharmacist who filled out an interest survey, BPS staff had to manually transfer the data into spreadsheets — which were kept in multiple places.

If a facilitator wanted information about a particular volunteer when putting together a team for a new activity, they had to track back through various historical spreadsheets to find out who the individual was, if they were qualified, and what tasks they had previously done or not done.

In that system, there wasn't an efficient way to cross-check with the organization's candidate platform to confirm if the pharmacist volunteers were currently board-certified — a requirement for some volunteer activities — or to see if anyone was slipping under the radar with an expired certification. It was also difficult to know which individuals had performed well in prior volunteer roles.

With more than 25 volunteer activities per year and thousands of volunteers to manage, BPS's organizational growth was putting significant pressure on its manual volunteer management workflow.

The Solution

BPS's senior project manager for quality improvement, Shandee Trevino, clearly saw the limitations of the survey-and-spreadsheet process and began looking for a software solution. Trevino and BPS found Lineup and implemented it in 2023.

The Lineup team worked closely with BPS to implement the software and integrate it with the organization's separate candidate platform. The Lineup team also helped BPS integrate its Outlook email to use for volunteer communication. Referring to both integration processes, Trevino says: "The process was super easy and smooth. The Lineup team had everything mapped out to show exactly what they needed to do and who on our side needed to connect it."

Once Lineup was implemented, BPS began by running several pilot programs, including issuing calls for interest in participating in upcoming volunteer activities using Lineup's customizable forms, creating and sending non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) out of the platform, and utilizing Lineup's evaluations feature so facilitators could evaluate volunteers and volunteers could evaluate each other using simple star ratings and comment capabilities.

BPS currently manages over 2,800 volunteers in its Lineup database, with plans to add another 2,000 historical volunteer profiles and associated committee rosters to the platform to provide even deeper insights into BPS's long-term volunteer program performance. Going forward, they would like to use Lineup to recruit specialty council members and store their CVs for review and ranking. BPS would also like to move its email function out of Outlook and into Lineup, so that all volunteer-related communication comes from Lineup.

The Results

Since implementing Lineup, BPS has been able to:

Easily vet and assign volunteers
With extensive volunteer data captured in Lineup's database, BPS staff and team facilitators have easy access to the information they need to get a full picture of each individual, including proof that an individual has volunteered before, what tasks they've done, and what they've applied for coming up.

Now, the new workflow goes like this: BPS solicits volunteer interest via a customized Lineup form and invites volunteers to apply for various roles. Information provided by practitioners flows directly into their individual Lineup profiles, where their certification details from the integrated candidate platform can also be viewed. For those who have volunteered before, their information gets updated, and any comments from past volunteer activities also show up in their profiles.

Everything needed to effectively vet prospective volunteers and to evaluate their qualification for appropriate assignment is stored, managed, and accessible in Lineup, removing the need to update and maintain a series of spreadsheets. "The feedback I get is how easy Lineup is," Trevino says. "Everything is right there. It's so much more seamless than the spreadsheet process before."

Improve overall efficiency
With Lineup bringing critical visibility and efficiency to BPS, the organization is able to manage volunteers productively and in less time than they were previously able to do — whether quickly confirming past volunteers, recruiting new volunteers, or managing entire team assignments, start to finish.

"The productivity piece is especially true for our exam developers through the whole recruitment process," Trevino explains. "Say an exam developer sends out an assignment email and 72 people apply to be an item writer. The developer can see right in their Lineup profiles if they've volunteered before or if they have any conflicts of interest, like if someone teaches a class on the exam."

With all pertinent details captured and automatically input into each volunteer profile, Trevino's team, exam developers, or anyone else managing volunteers no longer has to spend time manually tracking down the information from individuals or having time-consuming back-and-forth conversations.

Evaluate volunteer performance
Lastly, one of the biggest headaches for BPS before using Lineup was that the organization didn't have a real way to evaluate volunteer performance to determine which assignments were appropriate for each applicant. But now, evaluations aren't just possible, they're integral to how BPS manages its volunteers.

As an example, if there is a concern that a council member isn't engaged, BPS can refer back to that member's evaluation documentation in Lineup and determine if there is a core area to address and work on with the member to help them re-engage.

"It's really helpful to see what's going on in the background of our volunteer activities," Trevino says. "Lineup's evaluations are a huge help because now we know that a volunteer has done item writing before, but we can also see from their performance evaluation how well they did with their assignments."

With a deeper understanding of its broad volunteer pool and individual performance, BPS is able to maintain its high standards and raise the quality of output of the many volunteer activities that help the organization deliver on its mission.