Volunteers needed to help gather data for vaccinatenj.com website that provides N.J. residents with vaccine availability information

If you have about 10 to 15 minutes a day to spare to help provide accurate and timely information to your fellow New Jerseyans about COVID-19 vaccination sites across the state, we could use your help as part of our volunteer effort.

Your volunteer support will help with the vaccinatenj.com project– a collaborative effort between a Princeton High School graduate, Planet Princeton, and numerous volunteers — to keep residents of the Garden State informed about how to make vaccination appointments and about vaccine ability.

Vaccinatenj.com is seeking volunteers who will each contact a handful of vaccination sites on a daily basis via website links, or in some cases via telephone calls or email, to check the status of vaccine supplies, appointments, and waiting lists. Volunteers will also update the methods people should use to sign up for a vaccine at those sites. We also could use a few more volunteers to help us with spreadsheet editing and other duties. The updated information will be placed on our spreadsheet, which is updated every day.

Why did we start this collaborative effort? Many residents seeking vaccine appointments are frustrated. Some spend a few hours every day on the phone and online trying in vain to schedule a vaccination appointment. Our goal is to help them and guide them to sources and resources.

These efforts will also help pharmacists and health care workers who administer the vaccination sites. Instead of spending hours a day fielding calls, answering emails, or dealing with websites that keep crashing due to the number of people trying to visit them, our hope is that these professionals can focus on their work as opposed to fielding calls all day when they are no longer taking appointments. We are working to provide a central source for the public that lists the sites that are accepting appointments across the state, with details on how and when to try to register or be placed on a waitlist.

We also crowdsource information from the public on experiences booking vaccination appointments and other up-to-date information and tips. For example, many seniors contacted us this weekend saying they must be doing something wrong because when they clicked the link in a state email to schedule an appointment, a time slot did not appear. The seniors did nothing wrong. Some sites had no appointments, while others crashed due to the number of people trying to schedule appointments on the weekend. Others tried to book their second vaccine shot. It turned out some sites have no appointments available for the follow-up shot.

If you would like to voluneer to contact vaccination sites or help out in some other way, please fill out our very shory online volunteer form by following the link: https://forms.gle/ThTU4gNovhYvjJrf9

Anyone can also add information to our database of vaccination sites in N.J. by posting a comment in our spreadsheet at .