When new volunteers visit your Community Hub, they're encouraged to either view your posted volunteer opportunities, or 'join' your volunteer community. The 'Join Us' button links to a general interest signup form that you're free to customize as needed.

As with all other Timecounts forms, when volunteers fill out the general interest signup form, they are asked to verify their submission. Once they've verified, they're given the option to create a Timecounts account.

Volunteers who verify their submission to the Join Us form will appear in the 'New Members' tab in Community. If you've indicated in your Settings that you would like to review and approve new members, you will need to select the volunteers listed in 'Pending Members' and click the 'Accept' button to add them to your Community Directory. 

If you've set membership management to automatically accept all new members, then your new volunteers won't appear in the New Members tab for review. Instead, they'll be automatically added to your Community Directory.

Whether or not you've set membership management to automatically accept applications, you may find that when you open the Pending Applications dropdown, there are unverified submissions.

If the volunteer who signed up wasn’t logged in and didn’t verify their email after applying, it’s considered an unverified submission.

Timecounts can only automatically accept verified applications, to protect you from spam.

To manage review unverified submissions, click the link at the bottom of the Pending Applications dropdown. This takes you to the 'Unverified' tab of the general interest form. 

 You will need to either manually verify or delete the submissions. An application may be unverified because a volunteer mistyped their email, or forgot to check their email for the verification link. As long as the application looks valid to you and you'd like to add the person to your database, we recommend that you verify it.

Once you’ve reviewed and verified these applications, they will appear in the Pending Applications section of the New Members tab for you to review and accept.

The New Members pipeline also includes any new volunteers who signed up for other activities, and who have not yet been added to your Community Directory. For example, if a volunteer applied for an assignment but they have yet to be accepted, you will see the volunteer in your New Members tab. Accepting the volunteer in the New Members tab will only add them to your Community Directory - they will still remain in the Pipeline for the assignment they applied for.

Note that you can also add applicants to your Community Directory straight from the profile card in an assignment, event, or gathering pipeline. If a volunteer is brand new, you can click on their name to display their profile card. Click the Profile tab in the card, and you'll see a button to 'Add to Community'. Adding them to the Community will add them to your database (and remove them from the New Members pipeline) while they wait for to be approved for an activity.