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Rather than a step by step approach to the (re)allocation of a volunteer to a project, this may be better expressed as the following set of conditions:

  • A volunteer who is allocated to the “Pool of Volunteers” with the “Unspecified” role is “on the bench” awaiting allocation to a real project. They may be a “newbie” or may have been a person with us for a long time and have finished all current involvements and is now waiting for a new challenge.
  • A volunteer who is allocated to the “Pool of Volunteers” with a role other than “Unspecified” is likely to be one of those “old hands” who is waiting for a new challenge and you have chosen to leave them with the most recent role as a memory of their capabilities.
  • A volunteer who is allocated to a real project (meaning specifically not the “Pool of Volunteers” project) must not have the “Unspecified” role as the act of allocating a volunteer to a real project includes working out what role they will be carrying out. A common role in that circumstance is “Peer Educator” as most of our real projects require that capability.
  • A volunteer who is moved from the list of volunteers on a project (the RHS) to the list of available volunteers on a project (LHS) will have his or her Activity Status changed to “Available” (rather than “Scheduled”).
  • A volunteer who is deleted from a project will have his or her activity record deleted and there will be no record that they ever worked on the project. You may do this if the volunteer was added in error. The best way keep an audit trail of who worked on the project is to change the Activity Status of the volunteer on the project from “Scheduled” to “Completed”.

You allocate a person to a project via the Assign Volunteers link on the nominated project. You can get to this link via Volunteers then Manage Volunteer Projects from the CiviCRM task bar. The link is a pop-up so you won’t lose your place on the list of the projects.

When you do this allocation you will always have to chose a role for the volunteer. This causes an Activity to be created that connects this person to this project with that given role, and the status of the Activity is “Scheduled” to indicate that the assignment is active. When you use this same link to un-allocate a person, the Activity is updated to have a status of “Completed” to indicate that the assignment is no longer active. This allows you to see that a person was on a project, but is no longer on the project. The Dashlets that show lists of projects take this status into account and only show you the people who are active.

Managing the allocation and re-allocation of volunteers across projects requires you to understand the structure and statuses and then to create the correct outcome (usually via the Assign Volunteers link).