When creating groups and subgroups, please consider the following:
Which missions do I want volunteers to see
What data do I want/ need to collect for reporting purposes
Please bear in mind: keep the groups simple. If you work for a small organisation, you probably won't have that many groups and maybe won't even use subgroups. The bigger your organisation, the more groups you will have. You might need to separate your volunteers on the following basis:
Roles (meaning they have completed certain training and induction)
Location (meaning they will only want to volunteer in those locations)
It is easier to create groups than to delete them. In order to delete a group, they need to be detached from ALL:
Volunteer profiles
Missions (active and archived)
Group chats
User settings restricting users by groups
You can always add groups later on. Keep it simple when you start and are getting used to the system.
How do the hierarchies work?
Creating groups and subgroups ensures that you and your volunteers have the best experience on Volunteero. Your volunteers will only see missions and group chats relevant to them. You, as the staff user, will be able to gather data relating to their groups. See image below, if you wanted to know how many volunteering hours were done by fundraising volunteers in the north east, you will be able to pull this out of the system really quickly.
Let's take the hierarchy below as an example. When assigning volunteers to groups and subgroups, you will normally assign them to the lowest subgroup. If I put someone in the fundraising north east group, they will receive the mission posted to the following groups:
'Fundraising North East'
'Fundraising Volunteers' (Parent group)
'All volunteers' (Top Parent group)
Just a heads-up: Volunteers can be part of up to 10 groups, and each mission can be posted to up to 5 groups. This is where group hierarchies become super useful! By posting a mission to a parent group, you can automatically include all of its subgroups as well.
When creating your hierarchy, you can have up to 5 levels, and each group can have up to 10 subgroups. This may not sound like a lot at first, but it actually gives you the flexibility to create a structure with over 400 groups if you ever need to scale up.
Please contact the team for examples and best practices if you are working on a large or complex setup.
Hierarchies Examples
DBS / NON DBS
You might want to contact all volunteers, or perhaps you only want to show certain missions to volunteers who have a valid DBS check. By setting up groups for 'DBS' and 'Non-DBS' volunteers, you can easily control who sees what.
Location and roles
There are a few different ways to structure the groups and subgroups when working with locations and roles. Here are two examples.
Example 1 - roles as a parent group
Example 2 - locations as a parent group
In this example, it's up to you which approach you want to take and what works better for your organisation.
Hierarchies and Staff Restrictions
Groups on Volunteero help ensure that volunteers see only the relevant information. Volunteers should be assigned to the lowest-level group they belong to, they will automatically inherit access to any parent groups above.
For staff users, group visibility works a bit differently. When a staff member is restricted to a specific subgroup, they can only view volunteers and missions within that group. They are also limited to creating missions for that subgroup only.
If a mission is posted to a parent group, the restricted staff member will not have access to it. This is because missions in a parent group can be joined by volunteers from multiple subgroups, which would expose volunteer details outside the staff member’s designated access, something we aim to prevent.
There are a lot of different ways to structure your groups and lots of things to consider when setting this up. Please pop us a message in the support button if you want to discuss your group structure. We are always happy to help!