Table of Contents
Promoting volunteer events
Consider emailing your supporters or a subset of supporters information about your upcoming event. Be sure to include a link to the event so they can RSVP.
Contact supporters individually and log your contact in your nation.
You can pull up a list of all of your volunteers by going to People and selecting volunteers from the first dropdown menu. Once you open a person's profile, you can log a contact with them. Calling someone or connecting face-to-face is the most effective way to ask them to volunteer for a specific event. You can take notes about your interaction in the text box section of logging a contact. Then you can select how you connected, what type of contact it was, and what the result of the contact was. Click the button that says XX was contacted where XX represents the name of the person whose profile you're viewing.
You can also RSVP a person to an event directly from the person's profile. When you click on RSVP in a person's profile, you can select from a dropdown list of all upcoming events and indicate the number of additional guests who will be attending the event. If you are entering an RSVP for the person contacted only, this number should stay zero.
Please note that you cannot indicate the person has signed up for a shift from the RSVP functionality within a person's profile. By editing the volunteer event and going to Event Details > RSVPs, you can edit the RSVP created via a person's profile to indicate a shift. You can also enter new RSVPs through this area of the control panel. From Event Details > RSVPs, click new RSVP. When you start typing a name, email, or Twitter handle, a list of possible matches from your database will appear below the box and you can select the correct person.
Event calendar
You can tag all volunteer event pages from Settings > Page Settings. Once you have three or more upcoming volunteer events, you can set up a calendar to only show these opportunities.
If you haven't already, create a new calendar. In Calendar > Calendar Settings, check the box next to “Include all events, not just the ones under this page.” Then, in the field “Only include events with one of these tags” type the name of the page tag you’ve used for all of your volunteer events. Click Save settings.
A calendar showing only volunteer events is a good page for people to land on after signing up to volunteer.
Shifts
Sometimes, your organization will have events that require volunteer help over a long period of time - for example, creating a community garden or phone bank supporters. To effectively manage volunteers for these types of events, you’ll want to allow people to sign up for shifts. To setup shifts:
1. Within your event, select Event settings > Basics.
2. Check the box next to Ask to sign up for Shifts and click Save settings.
3. Then, define the shifts in Event settings > Shifts.
4. Give the shift a Date and start time.
5. Set a time Duration, it will default to 3 hours. You’ll probably want to limit the time frame of each shift to four hours or less, as you don’t want to fatigue your volunteers.
6. Select a goal for how many people you need to work this shift.
7. Click the Save button. Your shift will then populate under Shifts at the bottom of the screen. As people sign up for the shift, you will see the numbers next to it populate. You can click edit to modify the shift, or the arrow to delete it.