Skip to content

Automatic Schedule Confirmation Messages

Managing your volunteer schedule and keeping your volunteers informed are two crucial aspects of running your volunteer program. Volgistics includes a variety of options for scheduling your volunteers, and the system can automatically remind volunteers of their upcoming shifts a set amount of time beforehand. But you can also have the system send automatic confirmations as soon as changes are made to a volunteer's schedule. That way the volunteer can confirm with you that they can make the shift or reach out with any questions that they have in advance.

For example, you can have the system send an automatic confirmation when you schedule a volunteer for a new recurring shift.

Example of a confirmation for a changed regular schedule

This help topic explains how to enable automatic schedule confirmation messages and how they work.

Enabling Schedule Confirmations

The options to enable automatic schedule confirmation messages are found on the Setup page of your account. If you do not have access to that option in the menu, you should contact an Administrator in your account for assistance.

With access to Setup, go to the schedule confirmation settings like this:

  1. Choose Setup from the menu.
  2. Expand Scheduling.
  3. Click Schedule Confirmations.

Volgistics lets you keep volunteers informed of their schedules by sending confirmation messages when volunteers are added to the schedule, removed from the schedule, or have their existing shifts changed. Each scenario (adding, removing, and changing schedules) has its own set of options on this setup page.

Schedule Confirmations Settings

There are three possible options for sending confirmations based on who made the addition, removal, or change in the volunteer's schedule:

  • Themselves: With this option checked, the system will send a confirmation to the volunteer when they add themselves to or remove themselves from the schedule. Volunteers can add and remove themselves through VicNet and/or VicTouch via the self-scheduling feature. However, volunteers cannot modify their existing shifts, so this option is not present for sending confirmations when the volunteer's existing schedule is changed.

  • Any System Operator: With this option checked, the system will send a confirmation to the volunteer when a System Operator adds them to the schedule, removes them from the schedule, or changes their existing schedule.

  • Any coordinator: With this option checked, the system will send a confirmation to the volunteer when a Coordinator adds them to the schedule, removes them from the schedule, or changes their existing schedule.

Check the box for each scenario you'd like schedule confirmations to be sent for.

Receiving Schedule Confirmations

Like other messages sent from the Volgistics system, schedule confirmations are associated with a message type, and volunteers can control which types of messages they want to receive. So in order for a volunteer to receive the confirmation messages, they must be opted-in to receive the Schedule confirmations message type. By default, your volunteers should be opted-in to receive schedule confirmations once they've been enabled, but you can check whether a volunteer is opted-in by reviewing the Message Preferences box on the Profile tab of their record.

You can learn more about configuring message types and managing volunteers' message preferences in the following help topics: