Setting up Volunteer Activity Templates, Categories, and Activites

Before your community members can sign up to volunteer, you must first set up Volunteer Activities.

How to Set up Activity Templates (optional)

Activity templates can help save you time when you have to create the same kind of activity multiple times (e.g. a volunteer opportunity that the school offers its parents year after year). The settings that can be saved in an activity template include the activity's title, description, instructions, category, supervisor, and default block size.

1. Go to Volunteer >  Activity Templates
2. Click "New"
3. Fill in the settings you want to be part of the template
4. To use an activity template to create a copy of an activity go to Volunteers > Activities then click the “New” button and select “New from Template.” In the page that opens up, select the activity template you want to use from the “Activity Template” drop-down field.

How to Set up Activity Categories

Activity categories help you group and organize your volunteer activities. Categories also permit volunteers to filter opportunities by activity categories in the portal.

1. Go to Volunteers > Activity Categories
2. Add or edit as many activity categories as you need.

How to Set up Activities

Volunteer activities are the activities that volunteers can commit to. After you enter some information about the activity, you must set up time slots for the activity. Time slots are explained in full in their own section but it is important to know that time slots are what determines when and for how long a volunteer can sign up for an activity is.

IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT EVENT ACTIVITIES: As you work on creating you volunteer activities keep the following general rule-of-thumb in mind: for any activities that (A) are offered annually or semi-annually AND (B) require users to sign up for specific dates and times, you should create a NEW instance of the activity annually or semi-annually respectively. This is especially true (and necessary) if you are creating activities for a specific event (e.g. a festival that occurs annually in the Fall).

1.  Go to Volunteers > Activities
2. Click the “New” button. Here you have two choices of what to do next:
   
   1. Choice #1: If you click “New” again, you will start with a blank form and can create a new activity from scratch.
   2. Choice #2: If you click “New from Activity Template”, you may use a saved activity template to prefill some of the fields such as title, description, etc. and to save you time from completing many of the steps below. If you have not saved any activity templates and would like help on setting them up, see the section above titled “Set up Activity Templates”.
3. Give your activity a title such as "Mail Campaign Assistance", "Labor Day Phone Bank", or "Dance Chaperone".
   1. If you are creating an Event Activity (see "Important Note About Event Activities" above) then add a marker of time to the title such as "Spring 2018 Dance Chaperone."
4. Select an activity Category for the activity.
5. Enter a Description and Instructions.
6. (Optional) select a person who will supervise this activity.
7. Enter a default length of time in minutes for each Block of time for this activity. A block is the minimum amount of time that each volunteer must commit to the activity. Volunteers can sign up for multiple blocks if they want to volunteer more time. If you don't know the precise length of time for the blocks yet you can edit this value later.