VSys One: Volunteer Management Software

Action Links

Action links combine two things in one: an action and a link.

The "action" does something.
The "link" aspect points to the action, and can be used in multiple places.

Actions

Add team member, Remove team member	For use by volunteers who are "teams", these links allow the team leader to: Add people to their team. The lookup tool within this requires that the team leader search by the full e-mail address or phone number of the team member. Creating new team members from scratch is not supported. Remove people from their team. This removal does not delete the team member from VSys, it just removes them from this team.
Assignment crediting/results entry	Lets volunteers select from a list of recent, past assignments and take credit (get hours) for them.
Create news items	Allows volunteers to create VSys Live news items. Why? One organization uses this to let docents post news for other docents. The news items are tagged as "Docent", and a listing visible only to docents shows only those news items.
Interview lookup	Much like the job lookup tool, this lets volunteers search for and sign up for interviews.
Job/opportunity lookup	This implements the job lookup and signup functionality for volunteers.
Password reset	Used by volunteers who have forgotten their password, or never been given one. A new, random password is sent to the volunteer by e-mail and/or text message.
Self check-in/check out	Lets a volunteer check in and out of a current assignment.
Self-hours entry	Volunteer hours entry for themselves.
Send message	Creates an incoming message which is then handled according to the appropriate rules for that message type.
Training lookup	Lets a volunteer search for and sign up for in-person trainings.
Update login	Allows a volunteer to change their login ID and/or password. Requires that the volunteer be able to authenticate with their current login ID/password.
Update password	Lets a volunteer change their password alone. Requires that the volunteer be able to authenticate with their current login ID/password.
Upload file	A simple file upload mechanism; uploaded files become part of the volunteer's profile.

All of these actions contain their own settings options, and most also respect global settings for the VSys Live site. For example the Job/opportunity lookup action will not return jobs that are defined as Do not show for lookup on VSys Live, nor those disallowed in the Job signup section of the site's settings.

Links

Action links can be created explicitly and then used in multiple places:

Placed directly on a menu,
Placed directly onto a page, or
Inserted into a merge template.

Since VSys Live is creating these menus, generating these pages and assembling the merge templates, for all of these VSys checks the applicability of the action link before including them. That means, for example, that the Self-hours entry action link placed on a menu won't actually be displayed if no one is logged into VSys Live, or if the logged-in person doesn't meet the criteria for that action link.

Creating action links

Within a VSys Live site, click in Action links to define them. What you create here combines the action, for example "Job/opportunity lookup", with settings for that action. And there are a lot of settings. Most of them should be intuitive; for the rest, VSys usually comes with a series of built-in action links.

In this example, you'll see that we have the option of using a merge template to display the results of the job search. We get six(?!) of these options: one each for job slots, open schedule jobs and recurring assignments, plus listing (in the list of results) and signup (shown when the volunteer clicks on "Sign up" or "More info" from the listing) variants. If you leave these blank, VSys will supply reasonable values in place of your custom text.