Family groupings

Group related volunteers — a household, a couple, a parent and their kids — so you can see them together and know who to contact.

This is a grouping and a contact, and nothing else. It does not affect sign-ups, email, or hours. See What a family does not do at the bottom before you plan around it.

The Families board

Open Volunteers and click the Families tab.

The board has one column of Ungrouped volunteers on the left, sorted by surname, and a card for each family. A search box above the Ungrouped column filters that column only — it does not search inside families.

Creating a family

Two ways:

• Click + New family and fill in Family name (required, e.g. The Smith Family) and optional Notes. Click Create family.
• Drag an ungrouped volunteer onto the Drop here to start a new family area. The family is named automatically from that volunteer’s last name.

Adding and removing people

Drag a volunteer’s chip onto a family card. That is the mechanism on this screen — there is no “add member” button and no member search inside a family.

The other way in is from the person’s own record: open the volunteer, and set Family on their form. That dropdown also offers + Create new family…, which reveals a New family name box.

To take someone out of a family, set their Family to No family, or drag them to a different one.

A volunteer belongs to at most one family. Dragging them somewhere else moves them; it does not add a second membership.

The primary contact

One person per family can be marked the primary contact — the one you call.

It is set on the volunteer, not on the family: open their record and tick Primary family contact. The checkbox only appears once a family is selected.

Ticking it for one person automatically un-ticks whoever held it before, so promoting a new contact is one action rather than two. The family card shows Primary: <their name>, or No primary contact set.

It is not called “household head”, and it cannot be set from the family screen. A family record holds only a name and notes.

Renaming a family

Open the family and click Edit family. Change Family name or Notes and click Save family. Editors, Admins and the Owner see the button.

Deleting a family

Open the family and click Delete family. The page asks first: Delete the “Smith Family” family? Its members are kept, just no longer grouped. Click Delete family again to confirm, or Cancel. The volunteers are not deleted; they return to Ungrouped.

What a family does not do

This is the section worth reading twice, because each of these sounds plausible and none of them is true:

• It does not group sign-ups. The public sign-up form asks for a name, an email and a phone number, and nothing about families. There is no prompt to add family members to the same shift, and no capacity logic that considers them together. Each person signs up separately.
• It does not target email. There is no family option in Email Campaigns. Campaigns compute their audience from consent on individual contact records.
• It does not roll up hours. Hours are totalled per volunteer only. There is no family total anywhere in the product, and nothing in reporting that aggregates by family.
• It is not set by the CSV import. There is no family_name column. Group people after importing them.

If you need a family’s combined hours, add up the members’ totals yourself.

Last updated: 2026-09-15 · Applies to: CartonCrew v1.565+