03. Creating Your Event Structure
Posted by Gabrielle Long, Last modified by Matthew Murphy on 08 April 2019 04:56 PM
|
|||||||
Now that your Hub's look and feel are customized, it's time to start creating your event structure. Building Event GroupsStep 1.First, you will need to set up your event groups. Event groups are administrator-facing categories that help you group your opportunities and keep the site organized while also driving administrative functionality. Think of the way folders work in a computer: You build folders, with sub-folders and sub-sub-folders inside, to organize your files. Event groups are quite similar, as they allow you to organize your events (i.e., files), within a hierarchy of categories. The event group structure you build is more than just a way to organize your site - it also determines some of the functionality you'll have regarding reporting, emailing and landing page options. Once complete, your event group structure can make it easier for volunteers to find the events they're interested in as well as make it possible for you to build more granular reports and send emails to users who registered for certain opportunities. When building event groups, you will typically start with groups for your basic volunteer programs or, in some cases, your organization's main locations. You can then continue to build a hierarchy of sub-groups for specific sub-programs or sub-locations, as well as break them into sub-groups to indicate specific tasks or positions volunteers can hold for each position or location. To get started, click on the Events tab, then click the Event Groups sub-tab. Then, click the Add Event Group link (Figure 1).
Step 2.The New Event Group page should appear, as shown in Figure 2. Enter an event category in the Event Group Name field. For example, if you're building a brand new site and you have several locations where you hold regular events, enter the first location here (e.g., if you hold opportunities in Dallas and Amarillo, you might enter those first here so you can segment your opportunities by location). If your organization has one main region or city where opportunities are held and you prefer to drive your reporting capability by program type or department, you might enter those as the first level of event groups.
The Parent Event Group field allows you to select an existing event group as the parent of your new event group; therefore, the new event group would be listed as a sub-group inside the existing parent group. For your first basic categories, leave the Parent Event Group as "All Events." In the example above, we're adding a "Drivers" sub-category under our main "Warehouse" parent group. Check the Event Group Schedule View checkbox to have the event group available as a filter in the Volunteer View drop-down above your schedule of activities so volunteers can use those to jump straight to what interests them. We recommend checking this box for your first tier of event groups. After entering your event group information, click on the Save Event Group button (highlighted in Figure 2 above). If you would like to create additional event groups at the same level as this one, you need not return to the event groups page first. Simply replace the text you entered for the event group Name and click on the Save Event Group button again. You can do this for every event group you'd like to create. For this example, we will go ahead and create groups for the other two locations. When finished, click on the Event Groups sub-tab to view your complete list of event groups (Figure 3). You can also edit an existing group by clicking on it and clicking Edit.
Now that you've built event groups, it's important to understand the impact of that structure. Understanding the functionality that your event groups affects within your VolunteerHub site can help you make key decisions regarding the structure and number of levels within your event groups. You can learn more about the impacts of event groups in this recent webinar. As you build your event groups, it's critical that you mind the DOs and DON'Ts of creating this structure:
Step 3.It is important that you create all of your event groups before creating events, since event groups provide the basic structure for your events and help you to organize them as they are created. Once you're finished building the basic first-level event groups, remember to create sub-groups under them by clicking Add Event Group and selecting an existing first-level group from the Parent Event Group drop-down. The example above shows a completed event group structure with 3 hierarchical levels. Once you have built your event groups in your Hub, you will be able to take advantage of these great VolunteerHub features:
Creating EventsNow that your event group structure is in place, you can begin adding specific volunteer opportunities or shifts (called "events" in Volunteer Hub) within each event group. Check out the short video below on creating events, or continue reading below for step-by-step written instructions. Step 1.To create an event, click on one of the event groups you just created, or return to the main All Events page. For this example, we will add a morning shift for a front desk greeter position under the "Downtown" event group. Step 2.On the Summary page for the event group (or under "Upcoming Events" on the All Events page), click on the Add Event link (Figure 4).
Step 3.Begin building your event by providing a name for the event and/or shift in the Event Name field (Figure 5). In this example, we will create a recurring store assistant position.
Now select an Event Type. If this opportunity happens only once and not again, you would leave the Event Type set to "Single Occurrence" and enter the start/end date and times of the event. Our store position occurs every week, so we'll make a "Recurrence Master" (i.e., a template) and define the days and times (i.e., instances) on a separate page. This is great for opportunities that happen one or several times a week, one or more times a month, once every few months or even on an annual basis. If creating a master, the next page after you save the event will allow you to choose how often and for how long the event occurs. Next, enter a short description of the event. This description will be shown in the list of events on the main page of your Hub. Finally, enter a detailed description of the event, which appears on the detail page of the event once the user clicks on the event name. This is a good place to list out details such as required experience, details about the position, etc. You may also leave this field blank if no further details of the position are necessary. Three more fields will also appear on the detail page of the event:
The most important thing you'll do when creating an event is to select the event group in which that event should be categorized using the Parent Event Group field. This field should never be left as "All Events" - otherwise, it will be nearly impossible to find or report on the event later. If your site has the Volunteer View interface enabled, choose "Allowed" in the Hours Self-Reporting field to allow volunteers to report their hours remotely for the activity (for work-from-home opportunities). When they submit their hours for activities worked, those hours will appear in the Events > Approve Hours sub-tab for you to approve. Most activities will be set to "Not Allowed" to ensure volunteers are getting their hours through other means (e.g., checking in via OnSite/Kiosk). If enabled, users will be able to self-report up to 24 hours for each day the event is scheduled for. For example, an event scheduled from August 1st through August 3rd can have a maximum of 72 hours reported for each registrant.
The Registration section allows you to determine when, if at all, volunteers can register or cancel registration for the event.
The Email Notifications section allows you to customize the automatic emails that are sent to users who register for the event. By default, these emails will already contain the event name, date and time, but each contains an editable rich-text area where you can customize the message sent to the volunteer. Each of these emails can be disabled by unchecking the "Automatically send" box at the top of the corresponding email tab.
Click on the Save Event button when finished. If you built a single occurrence, your event will now appear in the Events list on the main page of your VolunteerHub site and should populate your event schedule. However, if you built a Recurrence Master, or recurring opportunity, you will be taken to the Instances page of that master to add dates and times (Figure 6).
Step 4.To add instances to your event, you will need to enter details into each of the numbered field sets in Figure 6 above.
Once the above are complete, click the Activate Instances button to activate the selected details. In our example above, we are activating 8:00am - 1:00pm shifts on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays only from June 1st through the end of the year. After clicking Activate Instances, you should see your instances populate the bottom of the page (Figure 7). From here, you can either edit or delete specific instances by clicking on them or add more instances to the same master.
Step 4.Once users begin registering for your events, you can view a list of all those users who registered for the event, print out a sign-in sheet or manually register a user for the event. Click on the Events tab and click on the desired event name. This will show you the Summary page of the event, along with several other sub-tab options, each corresponding to a different page associated with that event.
Click on the Registered Users sub-tab (Figure 8).
Here, you can view a list of users who have registered for your event or manually register a user for the event by first entering his or her name into the field beside the Add User button and then clicking the Add User button. This field automatically populates a list of matching user names once you've typed in a few letters, so you won't have to type the user's entire name in most cases - just click on the desired user's name and click Add User. You can also click on one of the Sign-In Sheet buttons at the top of the section to generate a sign-in sheet for your users to check in and out with on the day of the event. The sign-in sheet can be opened as a PDF and printed, or you can export it to Excel to make changes before printing it. We'll go over the rest of the options in this page later in Part 5 of this tutorial. Now that you've created a basic event structure and registered a user for your first event, it is time to build User Groups.
| |||||||
|