You can sign up for volunteer opportunities in Benevity Volunteer on behalf of users in the program. For example, if you are organizing a team building event, sign everyone up so that their involvement is recorded in the program. They will receive automatic reminders for the event and time tracking!
Permissions
To sign up volunteers for an opportunity, you must have the volunteer manager role.
Signing up volunteers for an opportunity shift
To sign up users for a single volunteer opportunity and shift:
- Open a volunteer opportunity and select Sign Ups at the top.
- Select Sign-Up Volunteers.
- There are two options for identifying users:
- Find a user by name or email address using the search bar under Add Volunteer Sign-ups. Select Add next to the users name and add additional users if needed.
- Bulk Sign-up. Identify users by Employee ID, Username, or Email address. Enter one unique identifier per line.
- Choose a shift to sign up for in the dropdown. Only one shift can be selected for the identified users.
- Choose whether to Notify users of sign-up by email.
- Choose whether to Remind users 24 hours before shift. They will receive an email.
- Select Sign Up User to add the identified users to the volunteer opportunity shift.
All identified users are now signed up for the shift. If you enabled notifications or reminders, they will receive emails informing them of the opportunity.
Signing up volunteers for multiple opportunities and shifts
To sign up a large amount of volunteers for multiple shifts, you can use the bulk sign-up template. Open a volunteer opportunity and select Download Bulk Sign-up Template to get started.
Open the template, enter information for each volunteer and their shift and save the file.
Before you begin, it is important to note the following:
- Only one employee identifier is required. Enter either an employee ID, username, or email. The CSV must contain all three columns but Values are only required in one of the columns.
- Create a new row for every employee and a shift they signed up for. If an employee signed up for multiple shifts in the same opportunity, enter each shift on a new row along with the same employee ID and other details.
- The spreadsheet auto-populates with all available shift names and the associated shift ID. Every new row must have one shift ID and the shift name.
- There is a limit of 100 rows when uploading the template.
Template column headers
The first row in the template is the column headers that map to volunteering details. The following table provides a description of these fields and example formats.
| Field Name | Field Description | Required Format | Example |
| Opportunity ID | ID of the Volunteer Opportunity | Number | 3517 |
| Opportunity Name | Name of the Volunteer Opportunity | Text | Clean our Rivers! |
| Shift ID | ID of the shift the volunteer signed up for | Number | 6778 |
| Shift Name | Name of the shift the volunteer signed up for | Text | Recycling crew |
| Employee ID | The volunteer's employee ID | Number | 123456 |
| Employee Username | The volunteer's employee username | Valid username | anitaherzog |
| Employee Email | The volunteer's employee email | Valid email address | aherzog@mycompany.com |
| Email Notification of Sign-up | Enable/disable sign-up notification email for volunteer | Text field with options Yes or No. Yes means turn emails on. No means turn emails off. If left empty, defaults to No. | No (emails off) |
| Email Reminder Before Shift | Enable/disable shift reminder email for volunteer | Text field with options Yes or No. Yes means turn emails off. No means turn emails on. If left empty, defaults to No. | No (emails on) |
| Number of Guests | Number of guests that the employee is bringing | Number greater than or equal to 0 | 0 |
Additional fields for programs with PII turned off
If personally identifiable information (PII) collection is turned off for your program, your CSV file will show additional fields based on two scenarios.
Scenario 1: PII collection is turned off and t-shirt sizes are not required
The Guest # is Attending field is displayed. It is mandatory and accepts either 'TRUE' for attending guests or 'FALSE' for non-attending guests.
Scenario 2: PII collection is turned off and t-shirt sizes are required
The Guest # is Attending and Guest T-shirt Size fields are displayed. Guest # is Attending is mandatory and accepts either 'TRUE' for attending guests or 'FALSE' for non-attending guests.
The Guest T-shirt Size is for clothing size. The sizes available: x-small, small, medium, large, x-large, xx-large and xxx-large.
Uploading the bulk sign-up template
To upload the bulk sign-up template:
- Go to Manage > Volunteer > Import Volunteer Sign-ups and select Launch Import.
- Drag the saved template into the window, or select Upload Data from File.
- Select Yes if the first row in your file contains column names.
- Review the header mapping to make sure that each field is mapped correctly. If you need to change the mapping for any field, open the drop-down in the right column and choose the correct field name. Select Confirm Mapping when the columns match.
- Select Review and fix any errors if they are shown in red. You can toggle Only show rows with problems to quickly locate errors.
- Select Complete and choose Yes from the pop-up to confirm that you are ready to submit your bulk sign-ups.
Success! You've completed the bulk sign-up! For your own records, you can download a file with the sign-up information.
Fixing errors
After the upload is submitted, you may see an error message if it cannot complete, or can only partially complete. You can try the following steps to fix errors:
- Review the error summary table to see what needs to be fixed.
- Select Download File with Errors, shown on the alert message. Each error is listed in the last column of the file.
- Fix the errors and save the spreadsheet.
- Select Back to Bulk Sign-up Page and submit the new file.
Note: Volunteers that have already signed up cannot be included in the CSV file. If you try to include a user in your CSV that’s already signed up for that shift, you will get an error message. You may also receive an error message if you use an incorrect identifier, such as misspelling an employee’s username or email.