ivolunteer.com has many features and settings to help you sign up, track, and manage your volunteers. Our online help for volunteer administrators gives step-by-step instructions for the most common administrative tasks. We also provide answers to your participants’ most commonly asked questions. However, some volunteer management solutions deserve special mention. Here are a few tips and tricks for managing your volunteers with ivolunteer.com.
Get Organized with Database Groups
In ivolunteer.com, your participant database holds a unique record for each volunteer. You can update their contact info and run a report on their activity. (They can run a report on their own participation, too, in their My Commitments portal.) With a Premium account you also can email your database on demand. But what if you have sub-groups of volunteers with expertise and interest in certain types of tasks? Enter database groups. Database groups let you organize, manage, and contact…
Merge Duplicate Volunteer Records
It happens: a volunteer signs up with two different email addresses or name variations, creating two different participant records in your database. For database cleanup and more accurate reporting, you may want to merge those duplicate records into one. Here’s how. How does ivolunteer.com create volunteer records? ivolunteer counts a participant by first name + last name + email address. This allows multiple people (such as family members) to share an email address but sign up separately. However, people sometimes…
On-Site Sign Ups and Sign Ins
Online sign up is probably a key feature you are looking for in a volunteer management tool like ivolunteer.com. Online scheduling is, in fact, the main way that volunteer managers and other coordinators use our service. However, many organizations also want an easy way to sign up participants on location and then sign them in when they arrive to work. Easy On-Site Sign Up with Kiosk Mode Normally, you will want to enable email verification to protect the security of…
Charley Tip: Try a Template for Online Volunteer Scheduling
We want to make sure you have all the help you need for the best possible online volunteer scheduling. To that end, our CFO (Chief Fluffy Officer) Charley, who lives and codes with co-owner-developer Tad, reviews the latest features of ivolunteer.com. Charley wants to call your attention to the “Select a Template” step in the New Event Wizard. But we’ll let her speak for herself: Charley: Bark! Bark! … Bark Bark Woof! Translation: The dog walking template is pure genius!…
Tools for Schools: Online Sign Ups, Volunteer Management, and Reporting
Shout out to schools and universities! ivolunteer.com makes online sign ups easy and flexible for teachers, administrators, coaches, and parents. How do schools use ivolunteer.com for online sign ups? Elementary and high school administrators use ivolunteer to schedule and track many types of online sign ups: parents, students, and community volunteers. A signup sheet can be for a one-time event or a recurring volunteer need. You can also use ivolunteer to manage ongoing sign ups such as self-reporting student volunteer…
Connect and Communicate with Your Volunteers
How often do you need to communicate with your volunteers to manage signups and keep events running smoothly? We’ve got tools for that! Volunteer management is an umbrella for many interrelated tasks. We know one of the key challenges as a volunteer manager is to stay connected with your current, past, and prospective volunteers. ivolunteer.com offers several ways to stay in touch and ensure that your volunteers know the what, where, and when of the tasks they sign up for….
How to Sign Up Volunteers for Restricted Tasks
Sometimes, you may need to sign up volunteers for special tasks or roles. Here’s how to do that in your ivolunteer.com Event. By default, anyone with the link to an active opportunity can sign up for a volunteer slot. However, some jobs require prior experience, special training, and/or proof of age. From search and rescue operations to beer festival sales to sports referrees, you want to make sure the volunteer fits the task. The New Event Wizard steps you through…
Fine-Tune Your Volunteer Sign Ups
This Tips and Tricks post will tell you how to tailor your signup form for different groups of volunteers in your event or opportunity. Different Signup Prompts for Different Folks Volunteer sign ups in ivolunteer.com can have many sub-groupings, sort of like a nesting doll. These groupings are called Task areas. You may have one or many Tasks in your main signup opportunity. And you may need to collect different information during the volunteer signup process for different tasks. Creating…
Track Volunteer Hours with Flexible Self-Reporting
Wouldn’t it be great if you could track volunteer hours without setting a specific start and end time for a signup slot? Now there is an easy way to let participants self-report their hours worked. Tracking volunteer hours is usually automatic in ivolunteer.com. Date and time fields let you set a block of time for a signup slot. If your slot begins at 2pm and ends at 4pm, the system tracks that slot as 2 hours long. So when a…
Spring Cleaning Your ivolunteer.com Account
Your volunteer database may need spring cleaning, too! Keeping your database trimmed down and updated can save you time and money on volunteer management. Prune Your Database If you have used ivolunteer.com for any length of time, you probably have some inactive participants in your database. Clearing them out periodically can help administrators more easily manage volunteers and can prevent you from going over the limit of your ivolunteer.com plan. Under Database > Participants, you can use the ACTIVE dropdown list to…
Setting Up a Recurring Event
Many organizations have a need to set up recurring volunteer slots. In other words, their ivolunteer.com “Event” is not a single event but a regular volunteer signup need over time. In an Event’s Signup Design tab, you can create a Task that spans one or more weeks or an entire calendar month. These options are available when you click the Add Task button. Suppose you have a regular task that needs to be completed at a certain time every Saturday…
Create a Volunteer Registration Event
Many ivolunteer.com customers are organizations with a regular base of vetted volunteers. Some find it helpful to start the sign up process with a registration “Event” to collect initial information from current and prospective volunteers such as name, contact information, and volunteer preferences. To collect specific information (e.g., a phone number or a t-shirt size), they create Custom Prompts from the Event Details > Prompts tab of the Event. When a volunteer signs up, they are required to enter only…
Add Groups of Volunteers to Multiple Tasks
Sometimes, you may have a group of volunteers who will perform the same tasks across multiple days. If you are adding the volunteers to the tasks yourself, you can use the Database features of ivolunteer.com to speed up this process: This example assumes you are an Organization Administrator with access to the database and that you want to add a group of people to the same slots across three days: Go to the Database menu and create a group with the people you…
Copy an Event
Problem: Events take a long time to set up. You spent a ton of time getting the instructions, settings, structure, slot times, reminders, thank you emails set up for an event. Now you want to set up this same or a very similar event for next week. Solution: Re-use your work from the last event. Copying online sign ups is easy in ivolunteer. When you copy a signup event, you copy its structure and settings by default. When you supply…
How to Sign Up a Group in ivolunteer
Volunteering a group of people with one sign up has gotten easier in ivolunteer. This post has been updated to reflect new functionality. Now a participant can sign up a group and later adjust the number of people later from their My Commitments portal. The Problem: One Person Wants to Sign Up a Group for Multiple Slots In many cases, you may need to allow one participant to sign up a group of people. Suppose you’re setting up an event…
Using Tasks in an Event
Every event starts with one task. The tasks are where your signup sheets are located. You can have multiple tasks in an event, which help you break down and section off your event as needed. This can be helpful if you have a long event spanning several weeks or months. If you have several different jobs in an event it can help break down the event into those separate jobs as well. Here are some examples: The example above shows…