The contents of this article are as follows:

Overview

Create automation rule

Select metric type

Restrict scope to reports from a mission template

Award interval

Answer aggregation

Award threshold

Troubleshooting

Watch the video tutorial

Badges are a wonderful feature to help you reward and recognise the achievements of your volunteers. You can create and award badges manually or if you prefer, you can create automation rules. In this article, we cover how to set them up.

Badge automation rules are based on the reports that volunteers submit in Volunteero. This sets the parameters in which automation rules can be created. So for example, volunteers are likely to submit their volunteering time across all activities, and a rule can be set up to deliver a badge when the total time exceeds a certain number.

In this article, we will bypass the setup of the badge, if you'd like more information on how to create a badge, see this article.

Start by either creating or opening the badge you wish to create an automation rule for. Badges can be found by opening the "Volunteers" page and then the "Badges" tab.

When you have a badge open, you will see a toggle labelled "Automation Rule", toggle this option on and you will see a new panel expand with several additional options. See below.

With automated badges you can upload SVG image files to customise your badges further. SVG image icons can be accessed on websites such as svgrepo.com where you can search for interesting and unique icons like the examples below! Download the icon of your choice and upload it to your custom badge.

Here you have to think, is the badge based on a specific activity type or across the board. For example, you may have 2 badges:

This being across all activities that a volunteer may participate in so the answer to this question would be "Unrestricted". Meaning that when a volunteer hits 10 hours volunteering time in total they are awarded this badge.

This example could be specific for time submitted for a specific activity, such as befriending missions so you'd search the list for your befriending mission template and link this. Here the volunteer will only be awarded this badge when they reach 10 hours of volunteering time for befriending activities.

Does this badge involve hitting a milestone within a certain time period?

For example, if you are rewarding a volunteer whenever they hit this milestone whether it takes them a week or 3 years, you should set this as "Indefinite"

If not and they need to hit this within a certain time period e.g. 10 hours within a month, then you should select the relevant time period.

Important Note - Some badges can be unique, meaning they can only be obtained once. If you set a badge with an indefinite time period, you will be restricted to a unique badge because otherwise, the volunteer would continue getting infinite badges.

In this section, you select which question you would like to build the automation rule from. The drop-down list will show you all the questions across all of your custom reports.

So if you are looking to deliver a badge once a certain amount of volunteering time has been hit, you need to select the question which captures volunteering time. The default question for this is labelled "How much time did you spend volunteering since your last report" but keep in mind you may have edited the label of that question.

In short, what is the question that volunteers are answering that will drive when they are delivered a badge? It is that question that you need to select here.

You then need to select a calculation option to the right of the question field. Here you are deciding what type of calculation would you like to make on the answers that volunteers submit to the question you have selected. You can pick a Sum or an Average.

In most instances we have come across this will be SUM because it is after a certain milestone is exceeded that a badge is delivered e.g. Hits 10 hours of Volunteering time or hits £5000 in funds raised. However you could choose for an average, if you want to award the volunteers for their monthly averages for example.

Here is where you set the number that needs to be hit or exceeded before the badge is delivered. For example, 20 hours, £5000, or 3 actionable reports.

And that's it, you have set up your badges automation!

You must review your questions across your custom reports because this will be important for badges going forward.

For example, if you have 2 different questions to capture volunteering time, this will cause issues when trying to set up badge automation rules for total volunteering time because some volunteering time will come in under one question and some via another.

If you need help with this, please contact the support team in your support button.