title: “Volunteers, for a gallery”

This guide covers the Volunteer Manager module. If your gallery has not switched it on (the Owner does that in Settings → Extensions), this page will not match what you see — skip it for now.

Volunteers, for a gallery

For gallery staff. Volunteers is a contact list for the people who give the gallery their time without being member artists: docents who walk visitors round an exhibition, a friend who pours at every opening, the neighbor who helps hang a show. Name, contact details, a status, the skills they offer, notes, and an optional household grouping.

The one rule to hold onto: this is not where the desk rota lives. Member artists’ gallery shifts are planned, filled and tracked on the Schedule, and that keeps working whether Volunteers is on or off. See The gallery rota.

Before you start

Volunteers is an opt-in extension. A new gallery is not switched on with it, and only plans that include it can turn it on: Studio Ops includes it, Studio Web does not.

1. Go to Settings → Extensions and find the Volunteer Manager card. Searching for Volunteers, the word in the menu, finds it too; the card says In the menu as Volunteers.
2. If your plan includes it, the Owner or an Admin presses Enable. Anyone else sees Ask the owner to enable this extension.
3. If your plan does not include it, there is no Enable button. The card shows one sentence instead, saying it is not part of your plan; where another gallery plan includes it, the sentence names that plan and asks you to have ChAImp change your plan.

Once it is on, Volunteers appears in the sidebar for the Owner and Admins. Anyone else needs the Volunteer Manager tick box in Settings → Organization → Users. Seeing the list is not the same as changing it: adding, editing, importing, exporting, deleting and grouping need an Editor, an Admin or the Owner. Other roles with the tick box can read the list and each person’s page, and do not see those buttons at all.

Member artists appear here on their own

You will find member artists in this list even if you never typed one in. When a member takes a gallery shift in the member portal, or you add a member to a shift on the Schedule, CartonCrew files them here as an Active volunteer so their shifts have somebody to hang off. The same happens when a member of the public signs up for a shift on one of your public entries.

Leave those records alone. They are how the Event participation card on each person counts their shifts and hours. The name and email here are a copy taken when the record was made; the member’s own record is on the Artists screen, and changing one does not change the other.

A member you typed in by hand

If you added a member artist here yourself before they ever took a shift, link the two so the member portal uses your record instead of making a second one: Sidebar → Volunteers → click the person → the Gallery member card → pick them in Member → Link. From then on the shifts they take in the member portal are kept on this record. The card is shown to Editors, Admins and the Owner, and only when your gallery has members. Remove link undoes a link made by mistake, until the member takes their first shift from the portal; after that the record is theirs and stays linked.

The list

Sidebar → Volunteers → Volunteers tab.

• Search matches part of a name only, not skills or notes.
• Status narrows to Active, Inactive or Prospective; All statuses clears it.
• Sort by offers Name (A-Z), Newest first and Recently updated.

Each card shows the name, status, email, household and up to four skills. ⚠ No email and ⚠ No phone flag a record you cannot reach. The list shows 25 at a time; ← Previous and Next → page through.

An empty gallery reads No volunteers yet with an Add first volunteer button. If a search or filter finds nobody it says No volunteers match your filters.

Adding a volunteer

1. Sidebar → Volunteers, press + Add volunteer.
2. Type the Full name *. It is the only required field.
3. Add Email and Phone if you have them. The phone is formatted as (555) 123-4567 as you type. Both are encrypted at rest.
4. Pick a Status. Use Prospective for someone who asked about helping and has not started; Inactive for someone who has stopped.
5. Volunteer since is the date they started, if you know it.
6. Under Skills, type one skill (docent, hanging, Spanish) and press Add or Enter. Each becomes its own chip. There is no fixed list, so docent and Docent count as two different skills.
7. Leave Family on No family unless they belong to a household you track (see below).
8. Add Notes and press Add volunteer. The toast says Volunteer added and their page opens.

To change someone later, open their card and press Edit, change what you need, then Save changes.

One person’s page

Click a card. The page shows Contact, Skills, the household if they have one, the Gallery member they are (if linked), Notes, and Event participation: every shift they signed up for, with the date, the hours logged and a badge of Confirmed, Attended, No-show or Cancelled. Hours and attendance are recorded on the Schedule, not here. Click a shift’s name to open it there.

Delete asks first, on the page, for example Delete Jane Doe? Their 3 event sign-ups stay on the events’ rosters, but will no longer be linked to this person, so their hours will no longer show on a volunteer page. This cannot be undone. Press Delete volunteer or Cancel. Their past shifts stay on the Schedule; it is the link from this person to those shifts that goes, so their Event participation history is lost. Do not delete a member artist this way: the next shift they take creates a fresh record with an empty history.

Bulk import

For a spreadsheet of docents you already keep.

1. Sidebar → Volunteers, press Bulk import from CSV.
2. Press Download CSV template and fill in one row per person. Only the name column is required; status is active, inactive or prospective; skills are separated by semicolons; dates are written year-month-day. A phone must be a 10-digit US number, written any common way (555-555-0100, +1 555 555 0100); it is stored as (555) 555-0100, the same as a number typed into the form. A row whose phone is not 10 digits is not imported.
3. Press Upload CSV… and pick the file. Up to 1000 rows; files over 2 MB are refused.
4. Check the preview. Rows listed under Rows with errors (will not import) are skipped.
5. Press the import button, which carries the count (for example Import 12 volunteers), or Choose different file.
6. The result says how many were imported and lists any Rejected rows. Press Done.

Families

Sidebar → Volunteers → Families tab. Optional: a way to keep a couple or a household who help together on one card.

• + New family opens a form: Family name *, Notes, then Create family.
• Drag a name from the Ungrouped column onto a family to add them, or onto Drop here to start a new family to create one named from their last name.
• Click a family’s name for its page. Edit family renames it and edits its notes (Save family). Delete family asks first, then keeps the people and just ungroups them.
• To mark the household’s main contact, open the person, Edit, and tick Primary family contact. To take someone out of a family, set Family back to No family.

Exporting

Export above the list (CSV or Excel) downloads everyone who matches the current search and filters, with their email, phone (as (555) 555-0100), status, skills, the date they joined, their family and whether they are its primary contact. It is there for Editors, Admins and the Owner, because it hands out every phone number at once.

Turning it off

The Owner presses Disable on the Volunteer Manager card. Nothing is deleted, and the Schedule, the rota and members’ sign-ups carry on exactly as before. In a gallery the card will not offer Delete data: it says Volunteer data cannot be deleted while Event Manager is on, because doing so would erase who worked every past shift.

When it goes wrong

• There is no Volunteers in the sidebar. Either the extension is off (check Settings → Extensions) or your user does not have the Volunteer Manager tick box. Opening the page directly while it is off shows Volunteer Manager is off and, unless you are the Owner, Ask the Owner to turn it on in Settings → Extensions. Only the Owner can switch an extension on.
• There is no + Add volunteer, Edit or Delete. Your role can read the list but not change it. Ask an Admin or the Owner.
• The new household was not created. You chose + Create new family… and left the name blank; the form says Enter a name for the new family.
• The CSV will not load. CSV is too large. Max 2 MB. means split the file; Could not parse CSV means it is not a plain comma-separated file. Save it from your spreadsheet as CSV and try again.
• A member artist is in the list twice. One record was typed in by hand and one was made when they took a shift. Keep the one with the shift history. Linking the hand-typed one afterwards says … already has a volunteer record and names the other: delete one of the two first. To stop it happening, link a hand-typed member before their first shift (see A member you typed in by hand).
• Someone’s shifts are missing from their page. Check the Schedule first. If the shifts are there, their volunteer record was deleted and recreated; the old history cannot be reattached here.