Service Project Activity Schedule [VIDEO]

Service Projects allow you to track volunteers who set their own schedules and record their hours. Since Service Projects don’t have a set day/time that they occur, they allow volunteers to complete their hours any time. However, for situations where volunteers have let you know the particular time(s) they will be coming for a Service Project, you can build an activity schedule to store that information. An example of this would be an office volunteer who serves at various times, but always covers your front desk on Mondays from 9am to 12pm. 

Creating a Service Project Activity Schedule allows you to construct a framework for a schedule based on the dates and times a volunteer or group plans to serve and can be repeated into the future. These schedules are added into existing Service Projects in order for you to plan for upcoming attendance.

To CREATE a schedule for a particular volunteer or group within an existing Service Project, follow the steps below:

1. Click on “Search / Manage Existing Opportunities” under the “Opportunity Management” heading on the Main Dashboard.
2. Locate the project to which you would like to add a schedule, and click on the “Manage Opportunity” () button to view the main menu for the project.
3. Click the “Manage Service Project Schedule” link.
4. Select a volunteer or group that has already been approved and registered for this project from one of the dropdown menus at the top of the page. 
• If you chose a group, you will need to enter the typical number of people that will be coming to volunteer. 
5. Enter the start and end dates and times for the first shift in the “Schedule Start Date/Time” and “Schedule End Date/Time” fields. 
6. Optionally, add any “Notes” about the schedule. This could be any information you'd like to store about this particular schedule, such as what the volunteer is doing and why.
7. Click the button to “Create Service Project Schedule Entry”. The first shift will then appear in the Service Project Schedule listing at the bottom of the page.
8. To repeat this shift over a date range, click the “Repeat Schedule Entry” () button to the left of the new entry.
9. Set the parameters for the schedule in the pop-up box:
   • You can set the end date as far out as the end date of the Service Project or up to a year past the start date. 
1. Choose the specific day (or days) of the week that the volunteer plans to serve.
2. Choose the frequency of their scheduled shifts. This can be weekly, biweekly, or on the first, second, third, fourth, or last occurrence of the month. 
3. Select the date you would like the repeating shifts to begin (which would be the date of the second shift). 
4. Select the last date that the volunteer will be serving on this schedule. 
5. Click “Create Repeating Schedule”.

IMPORTANT NOTE: creating this schedule does not give the volunteer any credit hours, it simply lets you note when they are planning to come in. You can log their hours in a few different ways:

• If enabled for this project, volunteers can use the Sign-in Console or Mobile Sign-in to sign in and out to log their time.
• An administrator can log the scheduled hours from the Service Project Schedule page by clicking the check box to the left of the appropriate entry and then clicking the “Log Hours” button at the bottom of the page. 
• If enabled for this project, a volunteer can enter the hours themselves by logging into their account and inputting the number of hours they served via the “Record or Update Service Project Activity” menu item.

Once hours have been recorded, a stopwatch icon will appear so you can see at a glance that the hours are logged and that the volunteer will be credited. If the volunteer arrived early or stayed late, you can adjust their hours in the “Add/View Volunteer/Group Service Project Hours” menu just like you normally would. 

To VIEW all the times that the volunteer is scheduled, scroll to the bottom portion of the Service Project Schedule page. You can also see the schedule listed in the administrative calendar on the Opportunity Management Dashboard (see below) and the volunteer can see it when they log into the Volunteer Portal.

To REMOVE one or more of the shifts, click the checkbox to the left of the shift and then click “Delete Selected Schedule Entry” at the bottom of the page. If at some point the volunteer cannot complete the rest of their scheduled shifts, click the “Delete Repeating Schedule” () button to the left of the volunteer’s name to delete that entry and the rest moving forward.