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.

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!…

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…

Spring Cleaning Your ivolunteer.com Account

Thousands of organizations are meeting the challenges of social distancing to slow the spread of COVID-19. We here at ivolunteer.com are no exception. With disinfecting wipes in hand, we’d like to offer two suggestions for “spring cleaning” your ivolunteer.com account while you wait for life and volunteer scheduling to get back to normal. 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…

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…

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…

Sign Up a Group of People

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 where you have or need a finite number of resources. You need to sign up participants to either consume or provide more than one of those resources each, but you want to count each person against the limit. Real-World Examples: The Solution: Use Block…

Let’s Get Organized: Database Groups

Database groups can be used to organize the list of volunteers in your Database into easy-to-manage sections based on whatever you decide you need. You can have groups for different age ranges, skill sets, areas your organization covers, teachers, and much more. To create a group, go to the Database menu > Groups tab. This is where you can see your list of groups you have already created, select a group and see the volunteers who are in that group….