Volunteers

One landing page covers the entire program's health: active opportunities, total applications, pending review, fill rate, average time to fill, approval rate, available spots, overdue deadlines. Date-range filtered, with charts for engagement patterns, skills distribution, and application trends. A volunteer coordinator opens this page Monday morning and knows what needs attention before lunch.

Every volunteer opportunity links to a specific event or program at a specific facility — never a stand-alone "general volunteering" listing. The constraint matches how mission-driven organizations actually deploy volunteers: the work has a place, a date, and a purpose. Opportunities carry their own status (Draft, Active, Paused, Closed, Cancelled), category, time commitment, capacity, and application deadline. Clone an existing opportunity to spin up a new one in seconds.

Each opportunity carries a list of desired skills. Each volunteer's profile carries a list of skills they have. When an application lands, the platform scores the match as a percentage and surfaces it on the application grid — so the coordinator knows immediately whether this is a strong fit for an art workshop or a food-service shift before they read a single word of the cover letter. Skills aren't a vague impression; they're a calculation the system shows you.

Applications move through a defined flow: Pending Review → Approved or Rejected → (optionally) Revoked back to Pending for re-review. Each transition records the decision note and the staff member who made the call. Decision notes are visible to the applicant on Approve and Reject; revocation supports its own note explaining why an approval was pulled. Nothing happens off the record. A funder asking why a particular volunteer was approved or removed gets an answer that's already in the system.

When approving an application, the staff member chooses what the volunteer can do at this organization — including time entry. The choice is part of the approval moment, not a separate configuration step the coordinator might forget. The same permissions can be revisited later on the volunteer's Organization Info tab, but they're set deliberately at the start, when the relationship is being established.

For volunteers approved to an event-linked opportunity, schedule assignment is its own step. The coordinator picks which specific event schedules (Sunday morning setup, Saturday afternoon shift, etc.) the volunteer will work, with a job description per slot and an optional ticket-scanning permission per slot. A volunteer signed up for "the gala" doesn't end up unsure which shift they're working — the system tells them, and the coordinator's view shows who's covering what.

Volunteer hours run on the same time entry engine that staff hours run on — documented on the Time Entry feature page. The difference is what those hours become. Staff hours can flow into grant expenditures as Personnel or Fringe; volunteer hours flow into grants as matching contributions — the in-kind match that many funder agreements require. Approved volunteer hours from the same time-entry submission a coordinator already reviews automatically populate the match column on the grant report. No re-keying, no separate volunteer-hours spreadsheet.

Each volunteer record carries a Time Entry Requires Approval toggle. Some volunteers — the long-trusted ones who run a regular shift — can have their hours auto-recorded without going through the submit/approve cycle. Others go through the same submit-then-approve flow that staff time follows. The choice is per-volunteer, not platform-wide, so the program can be tight where it needs to be tight and frictionless where the trust is already established.

Background-check uploads, signed waivers, training certificates, completed signature documents — all attach to the volunteer record under SecureCare's standard Document Storage rules. Encrypted at rest, retained per HIPAA, visible only to staff with access. Secure Messages lives on the same record for in-platform staff-volunteer communication that doesn't fall through the cracks of personal email or text.

Send waivers, training acknowledgments, and policy agreements directly from the volunteer record. The volunteer signs through their email link — no additional account required. The signed copy attaches to the volunteer's documents automatically and locks from modification. The full flow lives on the Signature Documents feature page; the volunteer record is one of the surfaces it works from.

Volunteer Central isn't its own silo. Opportunities link to Events and Programs. Hours flow through the Time Entry engine. Approved hours land in Grants as matching contributions. Reports under Reports pull volunteer data from the same source. The volunteer record is the spine; everything else attaches to it.