CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi, Rob,

There is nothing baked into CiviVolunteer to facilitate this, and nothing like that is coming in 1.4. Have you tried using CiviCRM's scheduled reminders for this? Do you have some requirements beyond what scheduled reminders can do?

Back working on this, and just signed up for the Webinar this week.  More questions in the meantime.

I'm trying to set up some scheduled emails, and things are not how I would have guessed. Which isn't to say they're wrong, but I'm wondering about the best way to go.

1) When I put through a "Volunteer" form - which I equate to someone raising their hand saying they'll volunteer - the date/time stamp on the "Volunteer" activity is set to the starting date of the event.  It seems to me that this should be the date that they "raise their hand".  As is, it's difficult to schedule a reminder because the date might be very far in advance; in our case, 5 months from now.  The only available option to set up a reminder is x (time period) from/before Activity Time Date.  I want to send a confirmation that they have volunteered "now" - as soon as the form is submitted.  We've done similar things with membership signups where we send a welcome letter "0 hours after Activity Time Date and it works very well.  But that date/time is stamped the time of the membership.  It seems to me that if the starting time of the event was needed, it could be queried from the event and isn't necessary in the activity itself.  So, can I change this so that the Activity reflects the time the person "raised their hand" and submitted the form, or is this date actually used for some purpose?

2) I assumed that the "Volunteer Time" activity type would be used to log the time the contact was actually supposed to show up to their assigned job, or when the job was logged as complete.  But I've done both those things on sample data and that Activity type isn't showing up anywhere.  Is Volunteer Time actually part of CiviVolunteer, and if so is there a different purpose for it that I am not seeing yet?

Thanks