Building Your First Event

Events are the main way that you will record activity in CERVIS. There are four different types of events that allow you to create different opportunities for which your volunteers can register. To begin, let’s consider an example event occurring this Saturday from 9:00am-12:00pm.

We have included descriptions of several important fields to include when creating a Normal event below. Please keep in mind that this example is for a one-time event, if you have something that occurs more than one time or on a regular basis (e.g. weekly), there are other options available. For more details on the different event types, review the article linked HERE. 

To begin creating a new event, click on “Add New Event” from under the Event/Project Management heading on the Main Dashboard.

Event Name: enter the title of the event, this is the first information that volunteers will see about this opportunity.

Event Description: include information about the event that volunteers will see when they want to learn more about it. 

Event Start Date/Time and Event End Date/Time: enter the actual start and end time of your opportunity. In our example, you would enter 9:00am to 12:00pm on Saturday.

Number of Volunteers Needed: enter the number of volunteers you need for this opportunity.

Event Meeting Location: the name of the location (e.g. “Warehouse”, “Main Office”, etc.)

Event Meeting Location Address: enter the actual location of the event (i.e. physical address, GPS coordinates, or cross streets).

Event Organizer: select a user with at least Event Leader access to be listed as the point of contact for this event.

Event Interest Category/Secondary Interest Category: as mentioned in the Creating Interest Categories article, every event in CERVIS must be associated with one Interest Category and can be associated with two for further filtering. This is where you assign the category or categories to an event.

Service Credit Hours: enter the number of hours of credit your volunteers will receive for this event. In our example, the service credit hours would be 3.

Show on Web Registration Page: this field is very important as it determines whether or not an event is displayed to your volunteers. This option is set to “No” by default which means that volunteers cannot see or register for this event on their own (although you can send invitations). Any of the “Yes” options will allow volunteers to see the event, but only “Yes - Open” will allow your volunteers to both see and register for the event.