The Volunteer Layout allows you to share volunteering opportunities with your site visitors. Opportunities can be sorted by category and include a form that automatically sends an email to an admin on your website. Each volunteer opportunity is organized as a different article.

• Articles are a short blurb of content that display in areas of your website based on the categories you give them. The Volunteer Layout pulls in articles tagged with the category "Volunteer" and a variety of information is presented. 

• The Author is the contact person for each volunteer opportunity. It’s called an Author because who wrote a certain piece may be relevant on other portions of your website -- but this is the person who will be contacted when a site visitor submits the contact form for that particular volunteer opportunity. 

• All articles for a particular volunteer opportunity, should be given the category “volunteer.” You can also use sub-categories to allow the opportunities to be further sorted and filtered
. NOTE: Articles must be assigned to the parent category "Volunteer" and sub categories are optional.
• Articles display in Overview and Detail. In overview, or grid, the Summary of each article is displayed. If a reader clicks through, they will see the Detail view, which displays the more complete information from the Content box.

You will need a Page that uses the Volunteer Template -- your implementation team should have set this up for you already.

Navigate to CONTENT > PAGES and select your Volunteer Opportunities page (filter by category if necessary).

Enter the introductory content, quotes, video, images or other content you'd like to display on your Volunteer Opportunity page. This works using the standard commands in your WYSISYG editor or HTML.

Before adding Articles, you need to add some Authors and Categories to attach to the articles.

AUTHORS: You don’t have you have an author, but if you want your readers to be able to send an email, you have to assign a staff member. 


• Navigate to CONTENT > ARTICLES > AUTHOR and click, “Add New Author”

• Enter first and last name and link this author to the relevant user (tip: make sure that person has already been entered as a User.)


CATEGORIES: first, add your categories and subcategories


• Navigate to CONTENT > ARTICLES > CATEGORIES and click, “Add new category”

• Name your new category (youth, welcome, worship, etc) and select the correct parent category, "Volunteer." Click Done.


Now that you have everything set up, you can add Articles to become specific Volunteer Opportunities.

• Navigate to CONTENT > ARTICLES and click, “Add new article.”

• Give each Volunteer Opportunity (Article) a title, select the correct category (you may add more than one if you like), leave the series blank, and attach the correct Author. 

• Click “Save Content.” 


Each volunteer opportunity has an automatic form your readers can fill out if they are interested in volunteering in that area. If an Author is assigned to the article and linked to a user with an email address, successful form submissions will be sent to the author's email address.

If you need more than one person to receive an alert that a request has been submitted (i.e., an admin as well as the volunteer who coordinates any particular ministry), you can remove the default form and attach a custom form of your own. Click here for a help article about Forms. You may also need to contact Support if you need further customizations.

Some last tips and tricks about how to use your Volunteer Opportunities layout:

• Remember: You can work in advance if you use the Toggle date feature. You can enter a “toggle date” if you know when you want it to go from draft to live or vice versa. 
If you publish an Article to "publish" today, it will go back to draft on the date you set as the toggle. If you leave it as a draft, it will toggle to "publish" on the date you set.
• If your church uses a different phrase, like “Serve” “Give Back” or anything other than “Volunteer,” you cannot make this change on your own. If you need your website to display a heading other than “Volunteer,” please contact our Support Team and they can tell you about your options. 

• In a multi-campus site, the campus filter uses the Group. When you publish an Article you can publish the Article to the campus Group as needed.