Manage volunteer requests

Volunteer requests are what happen when a volunteer applies to take part in a volunteering opportunity or role on the platform.

When someone sees a volunteering opportunity they’re interested in, they can click to apply or offer their help. This creates a volunteer request, which is sent to the organisation or group that posted the opportunity.

From their dashboard, the organisation can view all incoming volunteer requests, see who has applied, and decide whether to accept, message or decline the request.

Volunteer requests make it easy to manage and track interest in volunteering roles — helping organisations find the right people and giving volunteers a simple way to get involved in their community.

Find the volunteer offer:

• Sign in.
• Use the main menu to navigate to your dashboard. 
• Navigate to 'your activities' and then 'manage your activities'. 
• Find the volunteer activity you wish to manage, then use the 'actions' drop down on the right to go to 'manage volunteers'.  

Contact the volunteer:

Before you can accept or decline these applications, you need make sure you’ve got all the information you need.  

• If linking to an external form to request additional information, you'll only see their full name here. 
• Otherwise, you'll see their full name plus a personal message from the applicant.
• Use the ‘send message’ button and start a conversation with the member.
• Ask them for more information before accepting or declining.  

Acept or decline:

• If you choose to ‘decline’, the member will receive a generic notification.  
• Always message the member before declining a pledge to explain why.
• If you choose to ‘accept’, the user’s application will be approved and they will receive a notification.

Working with volunteers:

• Connect with all your volunteers.
• Message all your volunteers to arrange when and where they will be volunteering.
• (If enabled) Set up a project team space to assign tasks, share documents and chat with your volunteers.

Log hours:

• Navigate to the 'manage your activities' section. 
• Find the volunteer activity you wish to manage, then use the 'actions' dropdown and 'manage volunteers'. 
• Add the number of hours completed against each volunteer.
• Write a thank you message and use the button to 'mark that they did this'. 

Complete a volunteer pledge:

• Navigate to the 'manage your activities' section. 
• Find the volunteer activity you wish to manage, then use the 'actions' dropdown and 'manage volunteers'. 
• Complete a volunteering pledge for a user by opening the options inside the arrow in the top right corner of the white box containing the volunteer's info and choose 'close this request'. 

If you are looking to manage a large group of volunteers, the 'teams' feature (if enabled) can be used to set up a team space for group chatrooms, task lists and document sharing. There are also other project management features including integration with tools such as Survey Monkey and Trello boards.