VSys One: Volunteer Management Software

People as Teams

A set of people volunteering together is a "team" to VSys. There are two types of teams supported by VSys: anonymous teams and teams with members.

Teams themselves are "people" in VSys, they're just also teams. Checking This is a team of people in someone's profile makes that person into a team. As a team the person has a:

Team name: This can be any value you want
Un-named member count (this was "Team size" in older versions of VSys): The number of people, including the team leader, represented by the team. For anonymous teams, VSys uses this as the default number of people for an assignment. For example, dragging and dropping the person/team onto the Jobs/slots calendar tool, the assignment will default to having this many people. Note: changing this count later does not affect any assignments which already exist.

Anonymous teams

"Anonymous" teams are teams for which VSys doesn't know the team members. These are most helpful for things like Boy Scout troops, classes lead by a teacher, and other sets of people who volunteer together but for which the names of the actual people are not known or relevant, or where the members vary. Enable anonymous teams in the System preferences and feature enabling tool under Feature enabling: People as teams.

With anonymous teams the team leader gets all of the credit for all of the hours, and a single assignment is made for the team leader.

When an anonymous team checks in on the VSys Kiosk, for example, the kiosk can prompt for the size of the team. In this case that size is the number of people who are volunteering today as part of that team. The same mechanism works for online job signup with VSys Live: entering the team size sets the number of people in the assignment.

An anonymous team cannot have an Un-named member count of zero.

Teams with members

For named teams, VSys knows who the people are who are linked to each team. Enable teams with members in the System preferences and feature enabling tool under Feature enabling: People as teams with members. These teams link actual individual people in VSys together, and those individuals get their own assignments and hours records. This type of team is more appropriate for families or other small, stable groups that often volunteer together.

Field name	Definitions and comments
Invitation codes	Setting one or more invitation codes restricts volunteers from joining this team online unless they enter one of the appropriate invitation codes. (Volunteers select teams from a drop-down list, and so can select any team, but VSys won't accept a selection without the corresponding invitation code.)
Only team members get assignments...	Normally when creating an assignment for a named team, VSys makes an assignment for the team leader (the person who is designated as the team) plus one for each selected team member. If this box is checked, only the people who are on the team are given assignments and none is created for the team itself.

Add people to a team on the Relationships panel. For each team member, create the relationship "Team member of"; this links the person to the team.

Using teams with members

Situation777	Process
Creating assignments	When you create an assignment for a named team, VSys will prompt you for the list of team members who should get assignments. For each team member you select, an assignment will be made for that team member, and the assignment will also be linked to the team.
VSys Live job selection	A volunteer selecting a job assignment using VSys Live will be prompted for which team members should also get assignments.
VSys Live checkin, VSys Kiosk checkin	When a team leader checks in, he's prompted for which team members are checking in at the same time. This is much like checking in for an airline flight where the airline kiosk will ask which members of the party are checking in together. Any team member can also check in independently, and check out independently.
VSys Live checkout, VSys Kiosk checkout	When checking out, a team leader or any team member will be prompted for which other team members are also checking out at the same time.