At this point, your event should be published and available for signup. Once volunteers start signing up you will see tasks appear on your main Dashboard in Timecounts, or depending on your Admin Notification settings, you'll receive email prompts to let you know of new signups.
You'll be directed back to your event to review applications and manage your schedule, so everything is in one place. Let's walk through what you can expect:
Overview: The event overview has prompts and guides to help you organize. It contains a summary of your event information, including time, location, and description. The Overview alerts you when there are tasks that need attention, such as applications to review, cancellations to acknowledge, or people to notify of shift changes. You can also change the status of your event, view your public event page, and edit event details.
The 'Schedule' information shows you how many volunteer slots have been filled in your schedule, and how many more slots need to be filled in order for all of your shifts to meet their minimum. For example, a shift with a minimum of 5 volunteers represents '5 slots to fill'.
Creating and Managing Event Roles
What jobs do you need at your event? Security? Registration? Ambassador? Those jobs are roles!
There are three things you can add to your schedule: roles, locations, and shifts. You can add multiple locations and shifts for each role. You can also add a 'reference' to each shift, which lets you further describe the role for that particular shift.
For example, let's say that you have a role called Workshop Leader. You need three Workshop Leaders in three different rooms, and each Workshop Leader will be running a different workshop - pottery, painting, or pastels.
When you create your schedule in Timecounts, you'd add the role 'Workshop Leader', then add your three room locations to the schedule: Room A, Room B, and Room C. Next, you'd create a new shift, select Workshop Leader as the role, Room A as the location, and add the text 'Pottery' as a reference for the shift.
When volunteers sign up, they'll see all of this information describing the role and shift:
Creating and Editing Roles
You can create new Roles and edit existing Roles by selecting 'Roles' in the schedule toolbar.
The 'Manage Roles' window shows a list of all roles in your schedule.
To edit a role, select the role in the list and click the edit pencil in the top right corner beside the role title.
To add a new role, type into the box 'Find or create a new role'. Click 'enter' to create a new role with the name you've typed.
As you type, roles you've used in previous events will appear as options. These are called Role Templates, because you can select one of these old roles and update itfor your event (e.g., change the description or skills). You can also decide whether you'd like to update the Role Template (i.e., write over the old details), or keep the details of the original Role intact for your next event. Role Templates are a fantastic way to save time writing out descriptions or editing role settings.
Role Description
When creating or editing a role, you're given the chance to add a description about that role. The role description is public - volunteers will see it when signing up for shifts. Short descriptions work best, since the role description appears on the same page as shift selection.
Role Skills
Type in the Skills box to attach skills from the Timecounts skills library to your roles. When a volunteer is credited for a role with skills attached to it, those skills will appear on their profile card as validated skills. The next time you need someone with bartending experience, for example, you'll be able to quickly search to see who has bartending as a validated skill on their profile.
Update the Role Template
Select this box if you'd like any changes you've made to the role to be saved to your list of role templates. The next time you create a similar event, you'll be able to quickly add roles from your Role Templates.
Managing Applications for Events with Schedules
How incoming volunteer signups work with event and assignment schedules. Once volunteers begin to signup, you will see notifications in the 'Volunteers' tab of your event. The tab opens to Pending Applications by default, but you can also click the dropdown at the top to see all Approved or Declined volunteers.
People who appear with a 'NEW' icon beside their name are brand new to your community database!
You can also tag and message people who have signed up within this tab.
Reviewing and Accepting Applications
If you've set your event to manual review of applications, then the first step is to click on each new name to open their application, or scroll to the right to see all responses in a grid. Accept people into your database and confirm them for the event by selecting the box beside their name and click the 'Approve' icon in the toolbar.
When you approve a response, that person is added to your community. Until you approve an application, the volunteer is not yet a member of your community directory. To help you manage new volunteers, pending volunteer applications for new event volunteers will also appear in the New Members tab of your Community until you've accepted their application.
If you choose to decline an application, you'll be given the opportunity to specify a reason and send an email to the volunteer. You're also given the option to save the application to your database.
If your event is set to auto-accept applications, you will still have to manually accept unverified applications, to protect against spam. An application is unverified if that person was not logged-in to a Timecounts account when they submitted their signup, and did not verify their email after signing up. Click here to learn more about verification.
If your event is set to let you review and confirm shifts, then your volunteer's shift requests will appear in the schedule as soon as their applications are accepted. You can return to the schedule to confirm and manage shifts as you continue to receive and accept responses.
If your event is set to auto-confirm shifts, then confirmed shifts will automatically appear in the schedule as soon as applications are accepted. Learn more about auto-scheduling.