Cutting Volunteer Transport Time in Half for The Big Event

The Big Event is Virginia Tech's largest one-day community service effort, bringing together 5,000 to 8,000+ students, faculty, and staff each spring to give back to the Blacksburg community. Getting student volunteers to service sites at local homes, and back again once the work was done, was a major logistical challenge. Transportation was coordinated through spreadsheets and in-person direction: organizers told individual drivers which volunteers to take to which address. With no central view of where drivers or volunteers were, every change meant another conversation, and moving volunteers to their sites and back took roughly four hours in total.

DirectDrive Now replaced the spreadsheet with a single coordination platform for the day. Organizers assigned rides digitally, drivers received clear pickup and drop-off details, and the team could see transport progress in real time instead of relying on word of mouth.