Debbie Pinard gave the volunteer roster a voice

Volunteer schedules have excellent manners on paper. Every name stays where it belongs. Every shift begins on time. The trouble starts when the volunteers become involved. Someone is late, someone needs instructions, and the person with the master list acquires the conversational workload of a small telephone exchange.

Debbie Pinard had spent much of her working life thinking about communications. In 2013, at 55, she started InitLive with her daughter Melissa, then 23. Both were working at Wesley Clover. Melissa brought experience managing volunteers at the YMCA. Debbie brought a software architect’s familiarity with getting information from one person to another.

The partnership gave the problem two useful perspectives. A schedule had to be created, certainly. It also had to survive contact with the day itself. Their proposal paired a cloud service with smartphones: organizers could prepare roles and shifts, while people on the ground could receive changes. Wesley Clover agreed to fund the business.

There is a pleasing economy to that origin. Mother and daughter did not have to manufacture a distant customer’s predicament. Melissa had encountered the work; Debbie understood the communications machinery. Between them sat the volunteer, generously donating time and still requiring somebody to explain where to stand.

02Before the roster, the ringing telephone

Pinard graduated from the University of Ottawa in 1979 with a degree in mathematics and physics. Her career took her into an industry where women were a minority, and where the imbalance became more visible as she advanced. Looking up an organization chart could apparently be an education all its own.

She joined Mitel in 1981 as a software developer working on a private branch exchange, the telephone system that manages calls within an organization. Across 18 years there, she progressed from software design to director of strategic technology. The eventual founder had spent years inside the apparatus that lets colleagues reach one another.

By 2015, her career included work at four other companies and more than 45 granted patents. At Wesley Clover, she helped startups with patents and developed an idea for communications using the cloud and smartphones. That idea narrowed toward people brought together temporarily, then toward events and the teams running them.

InitLive initially considered a product for event participants. Conversations with planners redirected the team toward staff and volunteers. The crowded attendee app market offered one reason to reconsider; the neglected work behind an event offered another. Listening to prospective customers changed what the company would build.

03The inventions behind the instinct

A patent granted in 1990 puts Pinard’s name beside a wonderfully practical problem: unanswered calls. Her programmable threshold alert measured waiting calls against the number of active answering stations and gave a supervisor an indication of the load. The question underneath the circuitry was plain enough. Could the person responsible see when the team was being overwhelmed?

The language belongs to telephone engineering, but the concern is recognizable to anyone who has managed a busy desk. A supervisor needs a signal early enough to act. Counting demand without considering the people available to handle it tells only half the story. The invention connected those two quantities.

Another patent, granted in 2004, concerned dynamic communications groups. Users could have role identifiers, with those roles determining their association with communications groups. Membership followed what a person did. For a reader looking back from InitLive, this is an intriguing earlier appearance of a familiar organizing idea: reach the people whose responsibilities make a message relevant.

That connection is a way to read her work, rather than a claim that one patent became a particular product feature. It suggests why the later event problem suited her experience. Temporary teams still need structure. A person’s assignment can matter more than their place in a permanent corporate directory.

Her inventions also reached beyond calls. In 1999, Pinard and Richard Deadman were named inventors on a patent for an automatic web page generator, assigned to Mitel. Its presence in the record adds another dimension to the career: communications work was already meeting the web well before InitLive appeared.

The patent title has the dry confidence of its genre. Automatic web page generator: no decorative adjectives required. Taken together, these records give the founder’s later work some texture. Behind the approachable business of volunteer scheduling stood years spent specifying how information, interfaces and people could be connected.

04A small company gets a very public test

In 2015, InitLive won both the audience’s People’s Choice Award and the judges’ decision at the IMEX startup competition. Its sales director, Alyssa, delivered the pitch. The company then had eight staff members and two interns; every staff member was also a shareholder. The stage appearance belonged to a small team with a tangible stake in the outcome.

Later that year, InitLive won the ibtm world Technology and Innovation Watch Award, beating 60 other international entrants. Judges assessed innovation, completeness of concept and value to the meetings industry. It was a useful audience for a company trying to persuade planners that managing the people behind an event deserved attention of its own.

The product combined preparation with responses to changing circumstances: shift signups, reminders, check-ins, replacement suggestions and broadcasts aimed at particular groups. Such features have little appetite for glamour. They become interesting when an organizer needs them, which is generally a moment with limited patience for a sales presentation.

Pinard welcomed the chance to demonstrate the product to an audience. “There is no better way to connect with people than to see InitLive in action,” she said. For software built around live coordination, a demonstration was an appropriately practical form of persuasion.

05Ottawa puts the hometown team to work

In March 2016, the Ottawa 2017 Bureau announced it would use InitLive to plan, schedule and communicate with volunteers during the celebrations of Canada’s 150th birthday. The company’s work would become part of a year of events in its own hometown. A local software business had acquired a particularly public local assignment.

InitLive already counted the World Economic Forum in Davos among its clients. Ottawa offered a different kind of proximity. Here was technology developed in Kanata being put to work by the city around it, with thousands of volunteers expected to contribute to the celebrations.

By the time of Pinard’s 2018 WISE recognition, she reported more than 450 events in 26 countries, including the Academy of Country Music Awards and the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. Her account put the Ottawa 2017 volunteer contingent managed with InitLive at 2,000. Those are historical milestones, marking how far the initial idea had travelled.

06Making room at the table

Pinard’s public comments about women in technology carried the perspective of someone who had worked her way through the ranks. She described seeing fewer women as she moved higher. She also recalled assumptions about which kinds of technical work suited women and men, joking about “boy-code and girl-code.” Even software, it seems, could be asked to observe a dress code.

She argued for encouraging girls toward mathematics and science earlier, and challenged the suggestion that women’s family lives supplied an easy explanation for their absence from technology. Family support mattered to either sex. Her advice to women considering the field was direct: “Women are just as capable as men. Don’t doubt.”

SheBoot now lists Pinard among its Champions, a group of supporters and allies for a program addressing the funding gap facing women entrepreneurs. The designation is specific; it does not turn every supporter into an investor. It does place her name alongside an effort to help more women build companies and find backing.

That effort has a concrete relationship to her own story. InitLive brought a mother and daughter into the same founding team, each with experience the business needed. It offers a useful example of technical knowledge and operational experience finding common work across generations, without requiring either generation to impersonate the other.

“Women are just as capable as men. Don’t doubt.”

Debbie Pinard · 2015

07Passing the CEO’s chair, keeping a hand in the work

In January 2018, Chris Courneya succeeded Pinard as InitLive’s CEO. He had co-founded prairieFyre Software, later acquired by Mitel, and had remained active as an investor in Ottawa technology businesses. His arrival connected another career from the region’s communications industry to the volunteer software company.

Pinard moved into the head of strategy role and remained on the board. She described Courneya as a “brilliant colleague and a great friend.” The change separated the daily chief executive’s job from the continuing contribution of a founder. Starting the company and occupying its top operating chair forever were separate decisions.

That is a less theatrical chapter than a founding announcement or an award ceremony, but a revealing one. The company had customers, a product and another leader taking responsibility for its next stage. Pinard’s place in its history already extended beyond a job title: the original communications idea, the founding partnership and the early years of turning that idea into a business.

08The volunteer’s time finds a longer life

Bloomerang announced its acquisition of InitLive on March 1, 2023. The buyer’s business centered on donor relationships for nonprofits. InitLive added the ability to manage the people contributing their time. The joining of those activities recognized that the same supporter might volunteer, give money, or do both.

Melissa spoke for InitLive in the announcement, describing its focus on volunteer experiences, workforce interactions and reporting on impact. Ten years after the company’s founding, the daughter in the original partnership was explaining its next chapter. The acquisition announcement also recorded that InitLive had been a Certified B Corporation since 2021.

In July 2023, Bloomerang launched Bloomerang Volunteer after rebranding InitLive and integrating it with donor management. The integration connected volunteer activity with a broader view of a nonprofit’s supporters. Work that began with coordinating an event team had found a place in the ongoing relationships that sustain an organization.

For Pinard’s story, that destination gives the early engineering choices a human consequence. Someone donating an afternoon needs an assignment, a message that arrives, and a schedule that makes sense. The organization needs to recognize the contribution afterward. Those small courtesies require systems as surely as a ringing telephone does. There is considerable work behind making generosity feel straightforward.