Author Topic: Chair person approval of volunteers - basic configuration question (Read 1002 times)

rjm · February 04, 2013, 04:39:01 am

We are new to CiviCRM and would appreciate an experienced view on what to use, groups or tags in a particular situation.

When a volunteer member signs up, we ask them what committee they would like to volunteer for. There are multiple types of volunteer opportunities segregated into committees. Volunteer committees have Chair persons. Chair persons need to approve volunteers. If they do not approve them that makes the volunteer available to another committee.

I am confused about how to structure the groups and where to use tags and am hoping for someone with more experience to guide us as we get the foundation laid.

The environment is within the Wordpress version.

So if there is a group All Volunteers which is parent to a group Committee A and the member volunteers for Committee A:

1. How should this be set up so that the Chair person for Committee A can approve or disapprove the volunteer?
2. What is the best way to give a chair person the ability to approve a volunteer but only for their committee?
3. We will want to send emails to all chair people only. Is this best handled by making a tag for “Chair” and then a smartgroup for chair people, or by making a group for all chair people? How will this group relate to Committee A?

Thank you for taking the time to consider this question.

Hershel · February 04, 2013, 06:29:15 am

First off, I think a committee would be a group and a chair person would be a tag.

Quote from: rjm on February 04, 2013, 04:39:01 am

1. How should this be set up so that the Chair person for Committee A can approve or disapprove the volunteer?

I'm not sure about this. You may be able to use ACLs.

Quote from: rjm on February 04, 2013, 04:39:01 am

2. What is the best way to give a chair person the ability to approve a volunteer but only for their committee?

Same.

Quote from: rjm on February 04, 2013, 04:39:01 am

3. We will want to send emails to all chair people only. Is this best handled by making a tag for “Chair” and then a smartgroup for chair people, or by making a group for all chair people? How will this group relate to Committee A?

I think a tag and smart group makes sense. This group won't relate to any committees, nor should it, as in reality it has the Chair for every committee, no?

petednz · February 04, 2013, 10:38:18 am

Some other options to consider are
- using a Relationship eg Volunteer for Committee X
- using an Activity for 'approved for committee'

Not sure of downstream issues eg
- how to give Chair access sufficient to create the relationship to 'only' their committee

But options might include

setting up an ACL group for all 'unapproved' Volunteers
all Volunteers are put in this 'smart group' automatically
all chairs have access to this group via the ACL
if a chair 'approves' the volunteer, then they also remove them from the Smart Group if the point is that this volunteer should not then be available to other chairs (not quite following your workflow)

rjm · February 05, 2013, 04:05:58 am

Thank you both.

rjm · February 10, 2013, 02:25:23 am

Quote from: petednz on February 04, 2013, 10:38:18 am

Some other options to consider are
- using a Relationship eg Volunteer for Committee X
- using an Activity for 'approved for committee'

Not sure of downstream issues eg
- how to give Chair access sufficient to create the relationship to 'only' their committee

But options might include

setting up an ACL group for all 'unapproved' Volunteers
all Volunteers are put in this 'smart group' automatically
all chairs have access to this group via the ACL
if a chair 'approves' the volunteer, then they also remove them from the Smart Group if the point is that this volunteer should not then be available to other chairs (not quite following your workflow)

So someone will purchase a membership in civimember.
We would like to have them select a committee to volunteer for, or if they are a prior member they will be shown what they volunteered for last year and given the opportunity to change committee.
They are now pending approval for the selected committee, waiting for chair person to approve requested volunteer committee.
Once approved, they now are move into that commitee's group, but they could also be disapproved.
If they are disapproved they can either move into a group of available volunteers to be reassigned to committees that need volunteers, or they are moved into a group of people not qualified to volunteer.

I am getting a little bit lost as to which methods are best for this type of scenario and any help would be appreciated greatly!

Hershel · February 10, 2013, 03:09:34 am

I don't think CiviCRM has any built-in tools for this kind of workflow. There has been progress in getting CiviCRM objects to appear as Entities to Drupal in which case you could use the Rules and Workflow modules, but I'm not sure as to the status of this and it sounds a bit complicated.

petednz · February 10, 2013, 12:56:42 pm

Is there any functionality required 'within' the group - eg communications/discussions etc?

If so one route would be to use Organic Groups for your 'groups' - chairs manage the OG membership approval process - so the volunteers 'request' a membership to one of the OGs, the 'owner' approves or otherwise.
If otherwise then presumably they get a msg from the 'owner' suggesting they look at the list of other OGs and try one of them.

might work for what you describe

rjm · February 13, 2013, 01:26:25 am

Once a person selects a committee to join and is approved by the chair to that Group, we would want to manage some other basic stuff like printing access badges, dues status, a check box if they didn't work out so well, and the ability to remove the from the Group.

It would also be awesome if we could figure out how to assign them to a schedule and keep track of that within CiviCRM. And awesomer still if we could send them sms reminders of schedule commitments.

I am confused about the difference between a Group and an Organic Group. Are you suggesting that we switch to Drupal? It appears that OG is a Drupal function and we would prefer to stick with Wordpress.

Would ACL work for this?

What we would love to do is when a User becomes a member by paying dues, they are presented with a drop down or list of co-op/volunteer opportunities. They select one, or beter yet, given a first, second, third choice. The Chairperson approves the choice and they are smart grouped into that Group, and sent a welcome message. Can this be done with Wordpress and ACL with 4.3, or do we need Drupal?

Once they are in that Group we would like to further manage them by keeping track if they have checked in on the event site, if they were issued an access badge, and a simple performance disqualifier tag like "didn't work out". Again, can this be done with Wordpress and ACL or do we need Drupal?

In all cases the user comes into the CMS as either an existing user or as an anonymous user. They will then need to get into our system by purchasing a membership of some sort. They then need to have the opportunity to volunteer for a co-op committee, and further to be approved into that committee.

Suggestions for strategies and what we need to focus on learning more about would be extremely helpful. Thank you in advance for any tips you can offer!

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Author Topic: Chair person approval of volunteers - basic configuration question (Read 1002 times)

rjm

Chair person approval of volunteers - basic configuration question

Hershel

Re: Chair person approval of volunteers - basic configuration question

petednz

Re: Chair person approval of volunteers - basic configuration question

rjm

Re: Chair person approval of volunteers - basic configuration question

rjm

Re: Chair person approval of volunteers - basic configuration question

Hershel

Re: Chair person approval of volunteers - basic configuration question

petednz

Re: Chair person approval of volunteers - basic configuration question

rjm

Re: Chair person approval of volunteers - basic configuration question