You signed up to lead the group. Nobody mentioned the second job.

In short: The hard part of leading a group usually isn’t the campout, the game or the field trip. It’s the second job wrapped around it: reminding, chasing, counting and re-sending. That job comes from running a group on tools that were each built for something else, which is why it’s nobody’s fault and why it never seems to shrink. A few habits help a lot. Putting everything in one place helps most.

It’s 9:40 on a Tuesday. The kids are finally asleep, and you’re on the couch scrolling back through the group chat, trying to work out who’s coming on Saturday.

Six families said yes in the thread. Two said “probably”. One texted you directly, and one told your partner at pickup, which you heard about over dinner. The sign-up form says fourteen kids, the payment app says nine have paid, and there are two envelopes of cash in the car. While you’re counting, a message comes in asking what time the bus leaves. The answer is in Sunday’s message, about forty messages up. You answer it anyway, nicely, for the fourth time.

Then you remember you still haven’t reminded anyone about the permission slips.

The job you signed up for, and the one you didn’t

You said yes because of the kids. Maybe nobody else raised a hand at the parent meeting. Maybe your own child needed a den leader, a coach or a room parent, and you figured you could manage a few hours a month.

The part you pictured is real, and it’s the good part: the campfire, the game, the field trip, the concert. But it comes wrapped in a second job that nobody describes when they ask for volunteers:

• Reminding. Every event needs an announcement, a reminder and a last-minute reminder, and then there are the families who missed all three.
• Chasing. RSVPs that never come, a “maybe” that stays a maybe, and money that arrives four different ways, or not at all.
• Counting. Headcounts, who’s paid, who still owes a form, and whether the numbers in the thread match the numbers on the sheet.
• Re-sending. The same time, place and packing list, in the chat, by email, and in a text to the family who isn’t in the chat.
• Remembering. How you did this last year, who you called about the campsite, and where the forms ended up.

None of it is hard on its own. Together, it’s a part-time job that runs at night.

What the second job costs

The obvious cost is time, and volunteers are giving less of it than they used to. The average volunteer gave about 70 hours in 2023, down from 96.5 hours in 2017, according to the Census Bureau and AmeriCorps. And many leaders fit the job around a full-time one: in a 2022 national survey of more than 10,000 youth sports coaches, 83% also worked 35 hours or more a week outside coaching. Every hour the second job takes is an hour that doesn’t go to the kids, or to your own family.

The less obvious costs are worse:

• The hum. Even when you’re not doing the second job, you’re carrying it: the nagging feeling that somebody didn’t get the message.
• The family who falls through. It’s rarely their fault. The field change was buried under the snack schedule, or the email went to an address they stopped checking, and they find out at the gate.
• The leader who steps back. Good leaders rarely quit because they stopped caring about the kids. They quit because the second job ate their evenings. Then someone new starts from scratch, and the cycle begins again.

Every tool does its one job. You’re the glue.

It’s tempting to think the answer is to be more organized. It isn’t. You’re probably very organized already; you’d have to be, to keep this many plates spinning. The second job comes from the setup, not from you.

Most groups run on a patchwork of tools that are each good at one thing, and that were each built for something else:

• The group chat is built for conversation. That’s why it’s lively, and why the important things scroll away under the replies.
• The spreadsheet is built for one person at one desk, so it’s out of date the moment you share it.
• The payment app is built for splitting dinner with friends. It doesn’t know which payment was for which child or which event, or who hasn’t paid yet.
• The sign-up form is built to collect answers. It doesn’t remind anyone, and it doesn’t talk to the payment app or the chat.
• Email works fine, until half the families filter it, or never made it onto the list.

None of these tools is broken. But none of them talks to the others, so the person in the middle does it for them: copying answers from the chat into the sheet, matching payments to names, sending the same message in three places. That person is you. The second job is the work of being the glue.

What helps, whatever you use

You can shrink the second job a lot without changing a single app:

1. Give every event one home. Pick one place where the current date, time, place, cost and packing list live, and point everyone there instead of retyping it. When something changes, change it there.
2. Keep announcements out of the conversation. If the chat is for chatter, put what everyone must see somewhere it can’t scroll away, and tell families where that is at the start of the season.
3. Ask for the RSVP and the money at the same time, with a deadline. “Yes, and here’s my $35, by Friday” is one answer to track instead of two.
4. Schedule reminders when you post the event, not the night before. One a week out and another a day out catches most of the stragglers.
5. Hand off whole jobs, not tasks. A treasurer who owns the money, or a parent who owns communications, takes more off your plate than ten “can you send this?” requests. Give them the access they need to actually do it.
6. Write down how you did it. A short note after each big event (the campsite’s number, what it cost, what you’d change) saves next year’s leader an evening of guessing, even if next year’s leader is you.

Why we built Grouperly the way we did

Grouperly was born from running groups like these: scout units, teams and volunteer groups. It’s built around the second job, to take as much of it off a leader’s plate as we can.

• One home for every event. The date, the place, the price and the RSVPs live together, and families see every group they’re in on one calendar.
• RSVP and pay in one step. A parent answers for each of their kids at once and can pay as they RSVP, and you can hold a spot until they do. Cash and checks go on the same list, so one list shows who’s coming and who’s paid.
• Reminders that send themselves: a week before, a day before, as the RSVP deadline gets close, and when a payment is due.
• Announcements that reach everyone. They go by email to everyone on your roster, even families who haven’t joined yet, and you can see who each one reached.
• Jobs you can actually hand off. Roles come with their own permissions, so the treasurer can handle the money and a den leader can run their den without you in the middle.
• A group that remembers. Recurring events keep each year’s date, turnout, money and documents, and “Plan next year” copies an event forward with its checklists.

It’s free for every group, it works in any browser with nothing to install, and you can set it up yourself in an evening. Your group chat can stay: run the two side by side until your families settle in. Here’s how the first evening goes.

The good part

The second job is real, and so is the first one: the scout who finally gets the knot right, the team that wins one muddy game in the rain, the class that comes back from the museum talking about dinosaurs. That’s what you signed up for, and you deserve to spend more of your evenings on it.

Sources

• U.S. Census Bureau, “New U.S. Census Bureau and AmeriCorps Research Tracks Virtual Volunteering for First Time” (November 19, 2024)
• Anderson-Butcher and Bates, The Ohio State University LiFEsports Initiative, with the Aspen Institute’s Project Play, National Coach Survey: Final Report (2022)