We also have similar guides for ongoing missions and events.
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Please note: This article is based on best practices observed from organisations using Volunteero. However, we encourage you to customise the platform to suit your needs and those of your volunteers.
When to Use One-Off Missions:
One-time tasks or events
Short-term volunteering opportunities
Micro volunteering
Urgent or last-minute tasks
Standalone office or in-person activities
Any mission that people can join, complete, report on and then be archived away.
Mission Template settings
When creating your Mission template for your one-off mission, first decide on your general options for location, phone calling etc. We would recommend leaving the shifts off for the one-off missions as it’s just a one-off task. You can outline all information in the mission description, the details for approved volunteers section, and the mission schedule.
Notification settings and reminders
Make use of the ‘mission timeframe reminders’ so the volunteer knows in which timeframe they are expected to complete the volunteering task.
Start time: Set a reminder for volunteers for when their mission starts.
End of mission report reminder: turn this on so the volunteer gets reminded to submit a report after completing their volunteering.
Please bare in mind that these reminders will only work for missions that have a 'timeframe' specified. So make sure to add a timeframe when creating a mission or you can always edit a timeframe in as well.
Creating the mission
Select your template and client and fill in the details. You can make your admin work a little easier and enable automatic archiving when a volunteer says a mission is complete.
If you choose to use this option, then firstly we recommend doing so when there is only one volunteer assigned to the mission. In order for this to work you need to add a question in your report template that, is linked to the mission complete data link. You can also choose for a trigger to be sent to your inbox when a volunteer selects this. The question could be “Should this mission be closed?” for example.
If you want to manually archive the mission and have complete control, we would recommend not using this feature.
Visibility
Select what groups you would like to be able to see this mission. You can choose a visibility time frame. You can set the time you want volunteers to start discovering the mission, or be able to see it in their app. We would recommend leaving the ‘visible until’ time to always visible. This mean it will stay visible to the volunteer until the mission is archived off.
If you want to set reminders, this is where you set the mission timeframe that will enable these notifications.
Volunteer reports
One-off task are just as important as long term volunteering activities. We would always recommend to encourage your volunteers to submit a report after each one-off mission. Think about the questions you want to ask your volunteers to answer after their mission and include these in the report template. The following questions are a good starting point:
How much time have they spent volunteering?
Do they have any feedback or concerns that require action?
How are they feeling? Or how was their client feeling?
Rate their volunteer experience
Managing one-off missions
Before archiving a one-off mission please check if you have all the information from the volunteer(s) and they have submitted their report(s). If you have one volunteer you can set the mission up to be automatically archived.
As always, if you get stuck or would like to discuss your individual circumstances please don't hesitate to reach out to our team on support@volunteero.orgor use the support button on your dashboard.