Feature Release: Advanced Screening, Emailing and Scheduling Enhancements

InitLive, now Bloomerang Volunteer, was acquired by Bloomerang in 2023. Learn more about how Bloomerang can help you manage volunteers and grow your nonprofit!

Understand the interests of your volunteers with InitLive’s new shift waitlisting and approvals, shift confirmation, and auto-assigning hours worked features! With these new features, it will not only help administrators view which volunteers are interested and available for different shifts but also saves time for the volunteers to accept their shifts without digging into the system.

Many administrators spend a lot of time actively assigning and removing hours manually from staff checking in, which is the problem InitLive has solved with the new feature release! We’ve eliminated this and now have hours automatically added, let’s dive into all these useful new features!

Shift Waitlisting & Approvals

Admins can now allow their volunteers to express interest by becoming a part of a waitlist on shifts. This will enable administrators to gauge the popularity of the shift, have a pool of interested people to select from when rostering and get an idea of who to schedule when shifts need to be filled.

Staff and volunteers can view any open spots or waitlist spots to join in a shift they’re interested in. Administrators will be able to enable and disable the setting in bulk or individually, filter by the settings, view the appropriate data columns, and view all of the people on the waitlist.

This allows administrators to get a complete snapshot of who is on the waitlist across shafts or on an individual basis and are offered management capabilities that will let them make changes and adjustments accordingly.

New Shift Settings

Administrators can further control how they want the waitlist to behave in the sign-up area for volunteers with the new “waitlist behaviour” features:

• Allow Waitlist Overflow – Once the maximum number of volunteers on the waitlist has been reached, the shift gets marked as full.
• Waitlist Only – Volunteers will get automatically put on the waitlist and bypass the limit. Administrators can accept and schedule staff and can also move people from “scheduled” back onto “waitlist.”
• Block Waitlist Overflow – Administrators can put in a waitlist limit of how much overflow they want to count for.
• Date Scheduled and Date Added to Waitlist – Administrators can now know when users were added and can make intelligent decisions based on a first-come-first-serve basis.

Bird’s-Eye View

Explore InitLive’s new “staff on waitlist” feature, which provides a birds-eye view of where volunteers are and compare who’s on the waitlist versus who’s actually scheduled. Volunteer managers can also easily move people around, such as scheduling certain volunteers or putting them back on the waitlist.

Administrators can roster staff directly to the waitlist and get a microscopic view of who signed up for the waitlist and when. Get quick insights such as the waitlist settings and view the exact number of people waiting across each shift.

Confirm / Decline Shifts via Email

Providing the option for volunteers to accept and reject shifts right from their emails is designed to streamline the response process and lets volunteers respond quickly without leaving their email inbox and going into the system.

For example, administrators can quickly deliver multiple open shifts to their staff in one email for their volunteers to confirm/decline, all on one screen. 

Administrators can insert schedules on an email and customize what they want to add in the email, such as including confirmation or decline requests. Administrators can utilize the new “insert schedule” setting to get any volunteer to confirm a shift.

By including a request to confirm or decline shifts directly in the schedule, it saves volunteers and staff members from any back and forth communication that may cause confusion. Staff will be able to see the exact details of when their volunteers are working and have the opportunity to validate their attendance as well.

Automatically-Assign Hours Worked

Administrators can now set the InitLive system to accumulate their volunteers’ hours automatically and can track activity through the check-in-based reports.

Save time validating hours worked or cleaning up any hours worked logs manually, and let InitLive do it accurately and correctly for you! It doesn’t only stop there! The system also offers flexible options to allow managers to customize how they want the system to handle the hours worked information.

Here are the four new settings administrators can choose from:

1. Do Not Automatically Assign Hours Worked – Administrators can continue to calculate volunteer hours manually if they do not wish the automatically assign hours worked. Hours worked will be calculated from the users’ original check-in-out times.
2. Auto-Assign Hours Worked Right at Check-In – Automatically assign hours worked if a check-in occurs at any point in time. This helps administrators as they don’t have to go in and manually remove their volunteers’ hours so that they’re only attributed their actual shift hours.Ex – If a user was checked in for 4 hours while their shift length was only 2 hours, the user would only be assigned 2 hours automatically.
3. Auto Assigned Hours Beforehand – If a check-in doesn’t happen at all, they will automatically get assigned the hours. This is a great way to automatically assign hours for the older demographic who are unfamiliar with the check-in process or for any other volunteers who may forget.
4. Hybrid of 2 and 3 – The hours will automatically get assigned to the user regardless of the users’ check-in or check-out activity. This feature is great for organizations with an ongoing schedule or a major event with all their volunteers participating and have hours automatically assigned to them.

Regardless of the type of automation you wish to choose, your data will always be safe! InitLive will always save the record of your users’ original check-in and check-out times for you to go back and refer to.

With all these new features at your fingertips, it’s time to start getting out there and start using new and more effective ways of volunteer hour tracking! This helps administrators save tons of time from focusing on other vital areas of their organization.