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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.
Note that volunteers cannot see what groups they are part of.
Create a group
To add a group, go to the "Groups" page on the left-hand side of the Staff Dashboard. Press the "New Group" button and then give the group a name and description. Note that the descriptions are internal only.
We recommend structuring the group names depending on what attribute they define such as volunteer role, region etc. For example "Volunteer Role - Befriending", "Volunteer Role - Events".
We also recommend using the same colours for the attribute groups for continuity.
Create a group hierarchy
You can create group hierarchies using subgroups. An example of where this would be helpful is where say you have a area and a number of smaller regions that make up that area.
You have to start by making groups for the area and all of the regions. You will then open the group that will be your top-level group. Once you do this you will notice a tab labelled "Subgroups", open this tab.
Then by the name of the group, there is a plus + icon, if you press this, here you can select all the subgroups for that group.
Edit a group
To edit a group, you can go into the "Groups" page on the left-hand side of the Staff Dashboard. Open the group you wish to edit and you can then change the name and the description. Note that this will change the group wherever it appears. Just be conscious that changing the use of that group may require maintenance of the volunteers and missions with that group tag. For example, you may change the "Volunteer Role - Befriending" group name but that is in name only, The same volunteers will see the same missions.
Deleting a group is not advised. You will be unable to delete a group if it appears on any role, volunteer profile or mission. Worth also noting that reporting on historical activity for that group will not be possible. If you are decommissioning a group we recommend adding "live" or "not live" to the group name so that all staff know whether or not to use that group.
Groups to restrict access
If you create a mission, you can put it into any of your groups or a combination of groups. Your mission will be visible to any volunteers in any of those groups. This is a really important point. So if you add group 1 and group 2 to a mission, it will be visible to any volunteers in group 1 OR group 2.
Groups for reporting
If you wish to use a particular group purely for reporting, ensure that either just missions are given that group tag or just volunteers, but not both. Let's take an example.
Say you wish to use volunteer role groups to manage what volunteers can see what but also be able to see reporting on those roles. However, you also wish to see reporting on a regional level.
You must choose if you wish to see region statistics based on the volunteer location or the mission location. We recommend adding missions to the regional groups because if say you have a mission for London Marathon Supporters, volunteers can come from all over the country for this event in theory but most organisations would want to see the total volunteering time collected under a regional group for London. If you use the regional groups for volunteers, that recorded volunteering time would be across the various regional groups the volunteers are in.
The reason you should not use regional groups for both volunteers and missions is that you could find you present missions to volunteers who should not see them. For example, if you wanted to create a befriending mission and show it only to those volunteers with the "Volunteers - Befriending" group, if you also used the "Region - London" group for both missions and volunteers, Ashley Staines (below) would be able to see the mission even though as you can see, he is not qualified to be a befriender based on his group setup.
Groups for staff access
Groups can be used to restrict staff access, visit the staff users section of the system settings and assign a group to the staff user profile.
Please view our article on staff user roles for more info here.
We realise that correctly setting up your groups may require some thought so the Volunteero team are on hand to help! If you have any issues or questions, please use the support button in your Staff Dashboard to speak to one of the Volunteero team. We will be happy to help 🤓