Please note: this functionality is not relevant to all organisations within Volunteero. It requires additional set-up on your dashboard and a link to a hub organisation. Please discuss directly with your account manager should you wish to find out more and our team will help your organisation decide if this feature is suitable.
The functionality to support a federated structure whereby a connection can be formed between a hub organisation in Volunteero and local organisations.
This feature can allow for:
Provisioning of templates (missions, groups, forms, processes etc)Autonomy for the local organisations whilst benefiting from hub provisioned templated for improved standardisation
Insights and reporting for the hub across all connected local organisations
Centralised recruitment through the hub website with opportunities and roles posted by local organisations
Who is this for?
This is a feature for organisations that have a federated or network-type structure.
A federated structure is an organisational model where multiple semi-autonomous entities operate under a common overarching framework. These entities maintain a degree of independence but adhere to shared policies, governance structures, or strategic objectives set by the central organisation. This structure balances local flexibility with centralised coordination.
Key Characteristics of a Federated Organisation:
Autonomy & Decentralisation: Each sub-unit (e.g., branch, division, regional office) has decision-making power and operates with a high level of independence.
Central Coordination: A central authority (headquarters, governing body, or board) provides strategic direction, policies, and standards to ensure alignment.
Shared Resources & Best Practices: While maintaining independence, units collaborate and share resources like branding, technology, and governance models.
Legal & Financial Independence: Some federations allow sub-units to have their own budgets, legal identities, or governance structures.
Great examples of these are Citizens Advice and Age UK. For example Age UK and Age UK Bedford are distinct legal entities with a predefined relationship between the two.
Getting started
Firstly, it’s worth always ensuring you are in the right organisation in Volunteero. You should have access to a hub organisation. Note that you will likely have access to the hub organisation and potentially your operational organisation for your hub.
I know this sounds confusing but it is simpler than it sounds:
Your Hub Organisation is where you have management functionality, mainly to create templates and get the information to allow local organisations to connect to your hub (Hub ID & Join Code)
Your operational organisation for your hub is where you have full Volunteero functionality to create missions, manage your volunteers and more.
For the purposes of this article, you need to be in your hub organisation.
Setting up the Hub
Start in Settings. Here you will ensure your name, logo and branding are all in check. This is important because your national recruitment page will draw from this information.
For full instructions on populating your system settings visit the below guides:
Recruitment
When you click on the recruitment section, this will open your hub recruitment page. This page will display all the opportunities from across the network (i.e. all local organisations). The link of the page is what you will want to share with your website team to allow them to add it to your website. We would not advise doing this until at least some local organisations are set up and have created opportunities.
Worth noting that if you cannot see the opportunities for the local organisations yet they have definitely created them, it is likely they have failed to toggle on the below option for their opportunities. This ensures it is published to your national recruitment page.
Groups
You can create hub-provisioned groups. This will allow you to pull more accurate reporting. The hub-provisioned groups are made available to local organisations so it is important to:
Create groups and sub-groups that best reflect the majority of local organisations
Ensure that the local organisations use the hub-provisioned groups
When you use the insights feature, you may want to see things like volunteering time or number of volunteers for a specific group across the network. If so it is key that the local organisations use your provisioned groups.
You can create hub-provisioned groups in the same way you would create groups in a regular Volunteero organisation…
Groups serve 3 main functions:
Restrict volunteer access - Certain volunteers should see some opportunities and not others. Groups can be used to manage what volunteers can see on the Volunteer App.
Restrict staff access - Certain staff should be able to see some information and perform certain functions. Groups can be used to manage what staff can see and do in the Staff Dashboard.
Reporting - Groups allows you to filter all reporting and insights down based on select volunteers and missions.
We commonly see groups being used for regions, role types and training levels.
For full guidance on creating groups and group hierarchies view our guides:
Forms
Hubs can create form templates to be provisioned to local organisations. These include volunteer registration forms, reference forms and client referral forms.
The local organisations can clone these templates and then make edits and additions. The aim is to create as much standardisation as possible, offer a quicker setup for local organisations whilst also supporting their own nuances.
Read our guides on forms here:
Qualifications, Volunteer Tags and Client Tags
Similarly here you can create a suite of qualifications, volunteer tags and client tags which can be used by the local organisations. Again we would recommend really emphasising the need for local organisations to use any relevant qualifications, volunteer tags and client tags because it will aid in better insights and reporting capabilities for the hub organisation. They should only create their own if there is none that meet their needs from those provisioned by the hub organisation.
Pro tip: Keep in touch with your local organisations, if you find out they are using other tags and there is a theme i.e. many are using a similarly worded tag. Then it may be worth you creating a tag to account for this as a hub provisioned tag. You can then have them migrate over to that tag, see our article on migration here.
See our guides for:
Mission templates & report templates
Again here, you are looking to create as much standardisation as possible. By creating hub provisioned mission templates you are giving local organisations pre-made volunteering activities to leverage. With hub provisioned report templates you are defining the data that you hope local organisations will collect for various volunteering activities.
Remember: A lot of your insights are sourced from report answers so it is important the local organisations use as many of these templates as possible. However it is also worth noting that all questions in the hub report templates are available to the local organisations so they can make their own report templates using the questions you provide to them which will have a similar positive effect when it comes to reporting.
Guides for:
Insights
Using the insights dashboard feature will be no different than in a regular organisation. Please find the insights dashboard article below.
Worth noting one key difference. You can filter an entire dashboard by organisations. In doing so you are filtering just for insights across a selected subset of organisations. To do so click the Dashboard Filters option and then on the top left you will see a filter to select the organisations you would like to see insights for.
Connecting to local organisations
In order to connect to your local organisations, they actually need to connect to you. Here is how to do it.
Click the “Home” option from within your hub organisation
On the top right, click on the blurred section under “Join code” to reveal your join code
Copy this and send this along with your hub ID to the local organisations
Share the below instructions with them
Instructions to connect to the hub:
Open the system settings in Volunteero, and then open the Hub Organisations section
Press “Join hub” and enter the hub ID and join code
Done ✅
Approving Connections
Any requests to connect to the hub by local organisations will need to be approved by an administrator at the hub. Here is how to do so.
In your hub organisation, go to the “Home” section
You will see the request from the relevant local organisation
Press the “Activate” button
The local organisation will now be connected to the hub organisation
You can deactivate the connection at any stage.
If you require any further assistance, please use the support chat to ask a question to our friendly support team. We will be happy to help!