Agencies (Organizations soliciting volunteer help)

At a minimum, watch the training video! Alternatively, you can also attend a virtual session which will be led by a real person. The NUMBER ONE hint from people who have added an agency on this site is to take the training. Some did not and later wished they had. Both training options are provided by our software provider, Galaxy Digital. There is also an abundance of online help pages (see upper right corner of the screen and click on “HELP.”)

The following are things you might consider to make better use of the site. These are thoughts and issues that have arisen through others’ use of the site. Thinking about and understanding these issues will probably make your experience more beneficial.

General

• As a caveat. Galaxy Digital has updated their help since this page was created. Every effort has been made to properly redirect the links, but there are a few instances where the exact location in a page is no longer ilnked or in which the terminology is slightly different. The content should still be appropriate. If you have any issues or suggestions for improvement, please let us know.

• How to manage your agency: Look for the “MY AGENCY” link in the menu across the top or, if using on a phone or other device with a smaller screen, click on the icon in the top right corner and find “MY AGENCY” listed there.

• Know how to check responses: There are several ways, but the easiest is likely to be to use the Schedule tab of your Agency Manager dashboard. On this calendar view of your needs, there are also icons which indicate the response level for each need.

• Track(ing) volunteer hours: Keeping track of hours is important for both grant applications (in-kind donations at a minimum) and for generally understanding how well you are managing your volunteers. It is also great for guiding volunteer appreciation. The site has several features for tracking time, but it partly depends upon following the expected workflow. Essentially, the expected workflow is that you create needs, volunteers respond to needs (or you respond on their behalf), volunteers are checked in and hours are approved. If an agency manager checks volunteers in via the "check in" tab on "My agency" then the hours will be automatically approved. If volunteers check themselves in via either the check-in kiosk or the Causer app, then you will need to approve their hours. Sometimes you need to add hours for someone who helped, but did not respond to the need. To follow the workflow, you will then need to go back and  respond for them OR you can generically add hours by either just adding anonymous or “plus one” hours. If volunteers didn’t check in, but did respond, you can manually add hours for them. The simplest approach is to check volunteers in, but his ONLY works on the day of the need

• Plan some needs before promoting your page on the site/portal. If you know you will several needs in the near future and/or will have several recurring needs – add them initially before you start promoting your inclusion on the site. Once people start fanning you, they will get an email for each need and event you add – unless they have opted out of notifications (see the section on how to turn this off in the volunteering hints page).

• When creating needs … use clear names for volunteering needs and describe them clearly– the clearer it is, the more likely appropriate people will try to volunteer. Some hints are here. Also, make sure to set a date AND time. If no time is entered, it will indicate that you are asking for help at midnight and you are likely to receive fewer responses than you would like.
  
  Thinking through how to clearly identify and communicate your needs will also help you to resolve how you will add things going forward. You can make it easier on volunteers if you add a need once and (see next hint) add shifts to it. From that point forward, all volunteers will know what that need is and will be able to respond to specific shifts (e.g., “usher” for all shows and add shifts for each show) . Alternately, you might choose to name each need distinctly because you feel that will better elicit responses (e.g., “usher for MacBeth”). One additional advantage or disadvantage (depending upon how your fans respond) to using a single need with multiple shifts is that the site will not send a notification of an added need to all fans.

• Use shifts, unless you have a need that isn’t appropriate for shifts. Making the duration of a need “Custom Shifts” or “Recurring Shifts” will allow you to add (and continue to add later) shifts to a single need.

• Use the online help. BUT make sure you look at help for AGENCY managers … realize that there is a difference between SITE managers and agency managers. Thankfully, all help pages will tell you first thing if you need to go to another page for agency managers and will provide the link for you. If you search the help, consider starting all searches with the text “agency manager” (e.g., “agency manager create needs”).

• New ways to use volunteers: Expand your thinking about volunteering. People want to volunteer! However, many don’t want to make a long-term commitment. Nationally two trends in volunteering are itinerant volunteering (e.g., I will help you today, but no guarantees about ever again) and virtual (i.e., I can do something for you on my own time whenever and wherever I want). Would you benefit from having people do an itinerant and/or virtual task? Maybe you would benefit from someone moving things from one place to another while a regular employee or volunteer directs where they should go. Maybe you would benefit from having someone research and/or write something for you. Maybe you would like some novel social media graphics or videos. All of these could be volunteering opportunities.

• Policies/procedures: You may need to consider revamping your policies and procedures. If you need extensive training and clearances for much of your traditional volunteering work, you may not need it from people who help you move stuff or hand out water at a race or …

• Use the tool: Consider ways to follow the workflow of the site. Volunteers respond. They (or you on their behalf) check in when they are volunteering and then you review and approve their hours. Even though this may not be necessary for every volunteering need, you may benefit from having these (in kind) hours the next time you apply for a grant.

• Assigning volunteers in bulk. While one of the principal benefits of this portal is to allow volunteers to sign themselves up for needs (and free you up to other tasks), there may be times when you wish to assign volunteers to needs. This may be to be helpful or it may be to organize and balance multiple needs for a single event or initiative. For multiple related needs you might create one "handraising" event (i.e., "I want to help with the main event.") that volunteers sign up for and then you might assign them to a specific task. You can do this individually or in bulk using a number of approaches. The easiest approach is to :
  -- Go to My Agency
  -- select the Schedule tab
  -- select the Shifts tab**
  -- Select the DATE (#)
      (not the need, that will take you to the need edit screen)
  -- select the number under the Responses column
  -- Scroll to Available Volunteers
  -- select the ones you want to add
  
  at the ** above you could also click the "Schedule Volunteers" button at the top right of the calendar. That will also work, but is slightly more work than the above process.

Encouraging use

• Plan your promotion and volunteer management strategies and policies. You will still need to promote the site, or at least your portion of it, to people who volunteer for you. We hope you will also find new people, but one of the strengths of this tool is that it will help you manage your volunteers and volunteering needs. You can get people to sign up further in advance than they used to and you can track hours and see who is a volunteering superstar – but ONLY if you use the site and get your volunteers (new and old) to use the site.

• Helpful Links: When promoting your needs and events on social media and elsewhere, a convenient trick is to go to the Need or Event page and filter and set the view to show them the way that you want people to see them. For example, if you go to the need page and filter, sort, and display the way you want your audience to see them, you can copy the link and distribute it in order to show needs for ONLY your agency (in this case, Hamilton Gibson) and show them sorted by the nearest need (“soonest”) in list view (HG and ‘soonest’ are all in the URI that was copied after these filtering options were selected on the Search page and the “Search” button was pressed – “list” view was manually added to the link as described below). These links can be viewed by ANYONE whether they have a volunteer account or not AND will always contain the most current information from the site. However, potential volunteers cannot respond until they have an account. But for events, this just becomes a convenient way to see upcoming events (e.g., the Gmeiner events listed or in a calendar). The browser URI (the link starting with https:///volunteer) doesn’t always seem to have the view … so you may need to add “&view=list” or (grid, calendar, or map) to the end of your URI).

Important site characteristics

• Who you can see: When you want to interact with “your” volunteers, you will only be able to see accounts for volunteers who have responded to at least one need for your agency. Once a volunteer has responded to a single need, you can do a lot for and with them including entering hours and even signing them up for events. Again, you cannot even see volunteers in the lists until they have responded to your agency at least once. Even fanning you is not sufficient to make them visible.

• Cloning needs: If you want to make a new need but reuse most of the definition of an existing one, then go to the bottom of the existing need definition and press the “Clone Need” button.

• Events: Use the portal to promote your events by adding events. Unlike needs, there is no “shift” equivalent for events – all events are for a specific date and time. However, just like needs, you can “clone” existing events (the button “CLONE EVENT” is near the bottom of the page). So if you have an event happening on multiple days, add and refine the first date and, once you are happy with the results, clone the event for different event postings. You will need to update the date/time as well as the event title (otherwise it will identify the new one as a copy) then “UPDATE EVENT.”
  Don’t forget to get help for your events. You can coordinate needs and events.