Volunteers

Volunteers are the people who help at your events for free. They are separate from staff: staff are your paid helpers, with the staff portal, shift swaps and payroll, while volunteers have their own roster, their own rota and their own task list, and are never paid. Your volunteer roster lives under Volunteers in the Grow group of your sidebar; each event has its own Volunteers page under Manage.

What you can do here

• Roster — everybody who has helped at your events, or whom you want to ask. Add people one by one, or import the list you already keep as a CSV file. Each person gets a volunteer number (V0001, V0002 and so on) and keeps their history across all your events.
• Invitations — on an event’s Volunteers page, invite people from your roster, or in one click everybody who was confirmed at one of your earlier events. Each person gets an email asking “Can you help?” with Yes and No. They answer with one click, without an account.
• Sign-up from the event page — switch it on under the event’s volunteer Settings, and the event page shows “Volunteer with us”. People sign in, apply, and you accept or decline each application.
• Shifts — the volunteer rota: what, when, where and how many people. Put confirmed volunteers on shifts; they get an email when you do, and a reminder about a day before. Volunteers check themselves in and out, or you do it for them from the rota.
• Tasks — jobs for the team. A task can be for one volunteer, for whoever works a given shift, or open to the whole team. Volunteers tick their tasks off themselves.
• Volunteer ticket — a thank-you ticket, free or at a reduced price. Everybody sees it on the event page, but only the event’s confirmed volunteers can buy it.
• Hours statement — a PDF of each volunteer’s recorded hours with you, for a school, an employer or a scholarship application. You can download it from the roster; volunteers download their own.

Settings explained

• Volunteer sign-up on the event page — off by default. When it is on, signed-in people with a confirmed email address can apply to help. Nobody is confirmed automatically: every application waits for you.
• Text on the sign-up page — what helping involves, when to arrive and who to contact. Shown above the sign-up form.
• Thank-you message — shown to confirmed volunteers on the event page, at checkout beside the volunteer ticket, and in their confirmation email. {name} is replaced by the volunteer’s name. Leave it empty for a standard thank-you in the volunteer’s language.
• Volunteers only (on a ticket type) — makes the ticket a volunteer ticket. Give it a price of zero for a free ticket, or any price for a reduced one. Each confirmed volunteer may buy one, unless you set a higher per-person limit on the ticket for a plus-one.

Good to know

• Being on the roster is not an invitation. Importing a list sends no email; you decide per event whom to ask.
• Only confirmed volunteers can be put on shifts, be given tasks and buy the volunteer ticket. Taking somebody off an event frees their shift places and hands their tasks back to the team.
• A volunteer can change their answer from the invitation link: say yes after an earlier no, or step back after saying yes. Stepping back frees their shifts.
• Visitors see the volunteer ticket on the event page with a Volunteers only label, the way members-only tickets show. It is left out of listings, search results and the price your event advertises, so a free volunteer ticket does not make a paid event look free.
• Hours count from check-in to check-out. A shift checked into but never out counts nothing until it is closed, which you can do from the rota.
• Every invitation carries a link to opt out of your invitations. People who opted out are skipped whenever you invite.
• Team members can manage an event’s volunteers when their role includes the Volunteers permission. The roster itself stays with you.

Troubleshooting

• A volunteer cannot see the volunteer ticket — they must be confirmed for this event and signed in with the email address you invited. Accounts are linked to roster entries only on a confirmed email address; the invitation link lets them set up an account for exactly that address.
• Somebody was skipped when you invited — they are already on this event in some status, or they opted out of your invitations. Already-invited people can be sent the invitation again from the People list.
• The import says a column is missing — the first row of the file must name the columns, at least name and email. Download the template to see the exact spelling. Files saved by Excel, including German Excel with semicolons, are read as they are.

Related

• Staff
• Ticket Types
• Custom Roles
• Volunteering at an event