Workflow:

1. Gather up email addresses from your volunteers.

2. Add a bunch of events to a Google Calendar for your organization, and add your volunteers as invitees.

3. Each volunteer gets one email per event asking whether or not they plan to attend.

4. Each volunteer who plans to attend can get an email reminder 1 day, 2, days, or 1 week ahead of the event itself (organizer decides when and if these reminders are sent, and you can have multiple reminders sent per event).

Nobody has to have a Google account but you (or whoever’s organizing the events). I tested this by having my gmail account invite my work account to an event. After confirming my desire to attend this event, I got an email 24 hours before the event itself.

Now, this isn’t entirely hands-off for your volunteers. They will receive one email per event asking whether or not they’ll attend, but honestly, that may be a benefit for you, since you’ll know well in advance who can make it.

You could use Sandy to accomplish this. When you send the email about the thing to the participant(s), CC: Sandy and include appropriate reminder details about the thing. So, an example might go something like this:

From: Dave
To: Alvin, Simon, Theodore
CC: Sandy
Subject: Movie Premier

Body: Hey, guys, don’t forget our movie premier on December 14 at 7:00 P.M. We’re finally on the big screen!

Sandy, please remind us about this the day before.

Thanks,
Dave

Then, all of the participants are brought under management of your “virtual assistant” Sandy for this item only. If they are Sandy members, then they’ll get their info about the item there. Otherwise, it’ll come via email.

HTH

I’m trying out the Sandy program, I think it’s just what I was looking for.

The best way to send reminders to others and track them is to simply send them via email, in person, or by phone and then jot them down on your own waiting for list that you review every week. Make sure to jot the last time you took action following it up with them so you know when to check in again.

This is what I did when I designed my own setup for delegating things to others. I have a button that says “Delegate To”, I click this button, and it sends an email with a special tag “> Waiting For” at the end of that subject line. Once I’ve sent the email it automatically puts the item in my waiting for folder on my computer desktop with a note that I’m waiting for this person and that I sent them an email on the appropriate date. If the person emails me back, it grabs that waiting for item, changes it to @FollowUp: <> just got back to you, what’s the next action to move this forward? and puts this in my Actionable folder on the desktop. So far it’s working well for me and I think the same philosophy can be applied to different paper and digital implementations.

Hope that helps.