VSys One: Volunteer Management Software

Notifications

You can configure VSys One to notify you about all manner of interesting things. These notifications can be sent by e-mail, SMS/text message, or show as messages within VSys One itself. They can go to a specific person (people who you've indicated should be told about such things) or to automatic subscribers (assignment supervisor, training instructor, interview interviewer).

Who are they for?

Notifications can be targeted to your staff and/or your volunteers. Some of what you can do with notifications is like reminders, but there are many more notification "events" and who they're delivered to and how is much more flexible.

Concepts

The notification system is comprised primarily of four things:

• subscribers (those who want to be told about things happening)
• subscriptions (schedules and rules)
• events (the actual things that generate notifications)
• notifications, the messages themselves (shown or delivered to subscribers).

Notification Setup

Notifications can be simple, but they can also get very complex depending on your rules. Because of this you must designate one person in your organization who will coordinate the setup of notifications. This means someone empowered to make decisions or reach get a consensus agreement on how they're configured and managed.

We cannot tell you how your notifications should be set up: they're built according to your requirements. Failure to have a single decision maker on your end almost inevitably results in a cycle where person A changes one thing, person B changes another, and person C wants to undo both A and B. If we're given contradictory answers by different people or teams on your end, we can't choose for you, and we can't organize your staff. Have one captain on your team who can make the final sign off on decisions.

Before setup begins, you must document and write out the rules for:

• Rules under which notifications are generated,
• Who receives these notifications,
• Notification contents, and
• Any rules for re-notification, i.e. sending out the same or similar notification as a reminder of a condition that remains unchanged such as hours that still need approval or applications still pending.
• The interaction of notifications and eligibility checklists can be interesting. If you want to do notifications based on eligibility checklists, then the notifications and eligibility checklists should be overseen by the same person on your team.

Planning ahead for this is critical: if you change direction mid-stream, you may find that many implementation and training hours have been burned through and end up with the project going past deadline and over budget - and you only have a limited number of hours allocated in your implementation.