Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

Ryan Johnson is on a mission to help volunteer organizations, and it starts with replacing the clipboard when volunteers check-in.

His Nashville-based start-up named Bugle launched its volunteer management software in mid-September, some three and one-half years after he first encountered an unexpected challenge and opportunity.

Johnson was stationed at Fort Liberty, formerly Fort Bragg, in Fayetteville, NC, and was seeking an opportunity for his team to give back to the community.

“I called 14 nonprofits to find volunteering events,” he says, adding, “While I found it is challenging to find events, I quickly learned that it’s much harder to organize volunteer events, and that the average volunteer event takes it takes 40 hours to put together.”

After years of research and development in partnership with the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University, Bugle’s platform is now available to nonprofits worldwide. The start-up’s software enables nonprofits to efficiently organize and fundraise for community outreach projects, with the option to start for free using Bugle’s Community Plan.

Johnson says he met with hundreds of potential customers to better understand their pain points before his team wrote a line of code.

The first product offering that the Bugle team delivered was a QR code check-in tool that replaced the volunteer check-in paper and clipboard. Volunteers now have a variety of digital check-in options, to include using a QR-code, GPS on their device, or a digital kiosk on tablet or laptop.

“Digitizing the check-in process was an important starting point for us, not only did it speed up volunteer check-in, but also eliminated manual data entry for volunteer event organizers once the event was over,” Johnson said.

Since releasing a digital check-in solution, the Bugle team has released a new feature every three weeks for the past 18 months. What started as a tool to replace the check-in clipboard has now become an enterprise volunteer management solution that allows nonprofits to:

• Organize volunteer events 50 percent faster;
• Achieve more than a 90 percent volunteer data capture; and
• Turn community outreach events into fundraising opportunities with crowdfunding tools.

“We provide Bugle’s Community Plan at no cost to nonprofits, with no hidden fees or unexpected restrictions,” Johnson says. That comes with unlimited events, unlimited administrator accounts, unlimited volunteers, and unlimited mass texts.

For a fee of $24.42 annually for each employee, nonprofits can also upgrade to Bugle Premium to take advantage of Analytics, Reporting Tools, and Automated Data Transfer to an existing CRM.

“While one in four Americans volunteer annually, over 90 percent of Americans say they want to volunteer when surveyed,” Johnson says. “With Bugle, I believe we can double volunteerism across the country by 2030, by making it easier to find and organize volunteer events.

Why is he in Nashville? His last duty station was Fort Campbell, and the West Point graduate commuted daily from Music City to the base near Clarksville.

Bugle has recently received funding from the Launch Tennessee-managed “InvestTN” fund, a $70 million opportunity dedicated to making venture investments in Tennessee-located start-ups and early stage companies.

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