Volunteers

The record of everyone who helps: name, contact, status, skills, notes and family grouping.

Who this is for: admins and staff in an org with the Volunteer Manager extension enabled. The capability is volunteer_manage — the same one for reading and for writing.

Volunteers and Events are two separate modules, with separate extensions and separate sidebar entries. They share the volunteer list — an event sign-up creates or matches a volunteer record — but neither is a tab of the other, and shifts, attendance and hours all live in Events, not here.

Galleries

For a gallery, Volunteer Manager is opt-in. A new gallery is not switched on with it; an Owner turns it on in Settings → Extensions (search for Volunteers — the card is called Volunteer Manager) when the gallery’s plan includes it. Studio Ops includes it; Studio Web does not. A gallery that already has it keeps it, and its Owner can click Disable on the card to turn it off.

Turning it off does not affect the Schedule. Gallery shifts, the rota, members signing up and coverage all run on Event Manager. Deleting the volunteer data is refused while Event Manager is on — see Deleting an extension’s data.

The screens

Volunteers has two tabs:

• Volunteers — the list, with Search (by name), a Status filter, a Sort by control and Export, as CSV or Excel (email, phone as (555) 555-0100, status, skills, joined date, family and primary contact)
• Families — a drag-and-drop board for grouping people into households

Adding a volunteer

Click + Add volunteer. The form:

• Full name — the only required field
• Email and Phone — both encrypted at rest
• Status — Active, Inactive or Prospective
• Volunteer since — a date
• Skills — free text; type one and click Add to make a chip
• Family — an existing family, No family, or + Create new family…, which reveals a New family name box
• Primary family contact — a checkbox that only appears once a family is selected
• Notes

Click Add volunteer. To change someone later, open them and click Edit.

Who sees what. Reading needs the Volunteer Manager capability (Owner and Admins have it; anyone else needs the tick box in Settings → Organization → Users). Changing anything (+ Add volunteer, Bulk import from CSV, Export, Edit, Delete, the family board’s drag and drop, + New family, Edit family, Delete family) needs an Editor, an Admin or the Owner; other roles do not see those controls.

Deleting someone asks on the page first. Their event sign-ups are not deleted: they stay on the events’ rosters, but are no longer linked to this person, so their hours no longer show on a volunteer page.

Skills are free text, not tags. A volunteer has no Tags field, no tag picker and no controlled list, so use Skills to group people by skill, availability or region. Whatever you type is what is stored, so first aid and First Aid are two different skills. Agree on spellings before a bulk import.

What’s here

Attendance and hours are part of Events — see Events → Attendance & hours.

Turning it on or off

• To switch it on, open Settings → Extensions, find the Volunteer Manager card (searching for Volunteers, the word in the menu, finds it too) and press Enable. Whether it can be switched on depends on your plan; the card says why when it cannot.
• A gallery can switch it off from the same card. It stays listed afterwards, so it can be found again.
• Deleting the volunteer data (Delete data on the card, or Settings → Organization → Data) is refused while Event Manager is on, because it would erase who worked every past shift. The card shows that reason instead of the button.

What this module does not do

• No consent controls. A volunteer record has no marketing-consent checkbox. (Donor Management has one; this does not.) Email Campaigns computes its own audience from consent held elsewhere.
• No availability. Only skills can be recorded; the detail page’s card is headed Skills. There is no availability control.
• No hours. See Events.
• No link back to a donor. A donor record can be linked to a volunteer and reconciled from the donor’s page. There is no matching control on the volunteer’s page, and no indication there that a link exists.

Last updated: 2026-09-25 · Applies to: CartonCrew v1.719+