Now you’re up and running with your own TeamKinetic volunteer management system, it’s important to go through a few basic setup steps. Let’s start by customising things such as your ‘About Us’ page, terms and conditions, and registration fields.

The About Us page tells the people who visit your site the most important things they need to know about you: who you are, what you do, who you help through volunteer work and how you help them, etc. 

The Terms and Conditions can be changed if you wish, but if left alone your system will use the default TeamKinetic set of Ts & Cs instead. 

Registration Fields can be a very useful thing to customise as we know every organisation is different and may require different pieces of information about volunteers before they can sign up. 

Task

Customise your basic TeamKinetic setup options.

The Process

Step One
Click the admin cog in the top right corner.

Step Two 
Click ‘Setup’

Step Three 
For now, we suggest updating information in the following tabs:
– About Us
– Terms & Conditions
– Registration Fields
– Gender/Ethnicity Lists

You can find out more about configuring your system settings in this playlist. It goes through all the options available in the Super Admin menu (that’s you!)

We’ve reached the end of this workbook, by now your system should be fully functional and you should be comfortable with the basics on a day-to-day basis. You might even be comfortable enough to start training other people within your organisation to use the system yourself. If not, don’t worry, this workbook can be easily shared!

Now it’s time for you to figure everything else out for yourself…

Just kidding!

While we may not have any more lessons in this workbook, we still have resources to help you out while you continue to figure out the more intricate aspects of your TeamKinetic system. 

Case Studies

You can see testimonies from people who have used our system dotted throughout our blog posts. This is probably the best way to find out how to get the most out of the system. Below we’ve linked some of the case studies we’ve done in the past.

Universities: University of Manchester, 

Charities: Seashell Trust, 

Local Authorities: Stirling Council (Active Sterling), 

Sport: The LFC Foundation, GB Taekwondo, 

Healthcare: Warrington Halton Hospital, 

Help Videos

You can find short videos on almost every feature the system has to offer. They can be found by going to the ? box next to your admin settings cog (see right). There you’ll find an array of searchable help videos that should help you in a couple of minutes or less.

If you can’t find a video for a feature, feel free to contact us either through social media or by raising a support ticket and we’ll help you out!

We’d love your feedback!

We’d be extremely grateful if you could take a quick minute to complete this feedback form. This will help us improve the workbook in the future, helping all our users get the most out of their systems! 

Give your feedback here: https://forms.gle/BJc2HLKRVgRc2h86A

Now you’re more familiar with the system and you’ve completed a few opportunities successfully, it might be time to do some reporting on your volunteer base. Reporting can be an effective way to keep track of your volunteer management programme and how your volunteers are getting on.

Tasks

1. Create a basic report (e.g. based on a characteristic such as gender/ethnicity/age).
2. Submit a request for a custom report.

The Process

Task 1

Step One
Go to ‘Reporting’.

Step Two 
Click ‘Reports & Analysis’. 

Step Three 
Go to ‘Volunteers’. 

Step Four 
Select a date range and data set then click ‘Download CSV’.

Task 2

Step One
Go to ‘Help & Support’. 

Step Two 
Click ‘Support Tickets’. 

Step Three 
Click ‘Create New Ticket’. 

Step Four 
Fill in the required fields and upload a CSV data set of the report you wish to create.

Communicating with volunteers is an important aspect of volunteer management. The ability to reach out to your volunteers within the system is a must. With TeamKinetic, you have a few options…
Emails 
You can email volunteers through the system. These emails can be filtered depending on who you wish to contact.
Texts 
The text messaging service can be switched on or off and you can also dictate which automatic texts go out to site users. More text messages can also be purchased by admins.
Chat Rooms
There will be a chat room on each opportunity that can be accessed by volunteers, providers, and admins. If any further details need to be shared or if the volunteer has questions, this is the perfect place to ask them!

Tasks

1. Send an email to every volunteer who has joined a specific opportunity or who are part of a specific group.
2. Explore text messaging options: switching it on/off, automatic texts, and buying more texts.
3. Post something in the chat room of an opportunity.

The Process

Task 1: Emailing

Step One
Go to the ‘Messaging & Email’ tab.

Step Two 
Click ‘Volunteer Bulk Email’.

Step Three
Fill in all fields, write your email, filter, and send.

Task 2: Texts 

Step One
Go to the Admin Settings Cog. 

Step Two 
Click ‘TeamKinetic Options’.

Step Three 
Click the ‘Notifications’ tab on the left-hand-side menu.

Task 3: Chat Rooms 

Step One
First, ensure your site has Chat enabled. To do this, go to the Admin Settings Cog and click ‘TeamKinetic Options’. 

Step Two 
Click ‘Opportunities’ in the left hand side menu and check ‘Yes’ on ‘Enable Opportunity Chat Room’.

Step Three
Go to ‘Opportunities & Providers’.

Step Four 
Click ‘Opportunities’. 

Step Five
Find an opportunity and click on it.

Step Six
Go to ‘Chat Room’ on the left-hand-side menu.

After a few completed opportunities, you might be wondering how you can go reward volunteers for all their hard work. The first option to reward volunteers is through Achievement Badges. These badges are attached to volunteer profiles after they’ve logged a set amount of hours. You can also change the names and icons of the badges to match any reward systems you might already have in place.

Task

Set the number of hours needed to unlock each badge and change the name/picture if needed.

The Process

Step One
Go to the Admin Settings Cog.

Step Two
Click ‘Basic TeamKinetic Setup’.

Step Three
Click the ‘Achievement Badges’ tab in the left-hand-side menu.

Step Four 
Change the badges in any way you want.

Creating events is very easy and can be a great way to collate a bunch of opportunities that are related to a specific occasion, e.g. a festival. This will make the opportunities easier for your volunteers to find and easier for providers to manage. 

You can find out more about how we’ve previously helped organise large events in this blog post!

Task

Create an event and add at least one opportunity to it.

The Process

First we’ll create the event.

Step One 
Go to ‘Opportunities & Providers’.

Step Two 
Click ‘Events’. 

Step Three
Fill in the necessary fields and click ‘Add’.

Next, we can either create a new opportunity to be part of the event, or add an existing opportunity to it. 

Creating an opportunity as part of an event

Step One
Go to ‘Opportunities and Providers’.

Step Two
Click ‘Create Opportunity’.

Step Three 
Fill in all fields until you reach the boxes below.

Step Four 
Finish creating the opportunity as usual. 

Adding an existing opportunity to an event

Step One 
Go to ‘Opportunities and Providers’.

Step Two 
Click ‘Opportunities’.

Step Three 
Find the opportunity you wish to add and click on it. 

Step Four 
Click on the ‘Details’ tab on the left-hand-side menu and scroll down until you see the options pictured above to add the opportunity to the event.

By now we should have a volunteer on their first opportunity… but now what? You can now start to manage opportunities, completing tasks such as logging hours for completed sessions, using the chat room to send information to the volunteers on the opportunity, and processing applicants.

To log hours, the volunteer first leaves feedback (if this is mandated by your settings) for the provider/opportunity. Next, they enter how many hours they spent on the opportunity session. The provider/admin then leaves their own feedback for the volunteer and inputs the hours spent volunteering (they should match!).

Note: you’ll only be able to log hours for session-based opportunities if they have already happened and have a volunteer signed up. To log hours now for this task, you’ll need to create a flexible opportunity as hours for flexible opportunities can be logged at any time.

Task

Complete and log hours for an opportunity from both the provider and volunteer side.

The Process

There are a few different ways to complete this one but first we’ll look at how to do it from the admin/provider side.

Step One 
Go to the ‘Opportunities & Providers’ tab.

Step Two
Click ‘Opportunities’.

Step Three
Find the opportunity you want to log hours for 

Step Four 
Click ‘Log Hours’ in the left-hand-side menu.

Step Five 
Leave feedback for the volunteer and log hours.

It’s also important to familiarise yourself with the volunteer’s point of view when learning to manage opportunities in case they have any questions or issues with the process. You can see a video of this process below.

Step One 
From the volunteer homepage, go to the ‘Opportunities With Hours To Log’ box OR the ‘ Opportunities’ tab on the left-hand-side menu.

Step Two 
Click ‘Log’ / ‘Log Hours’

Step Three
Leave feedback for the provider and input the hours spent volunteering.

Now your site is properly set up and looks like your site instead of a generic TeamKinetic system, it’s time to get to work and create your first opportunity. All the different fields to fill in on an opportunity may seem complicated at first but you’ll quickly get the hang of it!

It’s important to get to grips with all these different options so you can go on to create opportunities quickly in the future and save yourself some time. Right now, the basic thing you need to know is the difference between session-based and flexible opportunities.

We covered this in the introductory page of the workbook but it can’t hurt to go over it again!

Session-based Opportunities
Sessions can either be recurring (daily, weekly, monthly, etc) or individual. They’re used for activities that have a specific time/date they need to be completed on.

Flexible opportunities
In contrast, flexible opportunities can be completed at any time. This is great for opportunities that can be done online, such as language translations, or over the phone, such as befriending.

Task

Create an opportunity.

The Process

Step One
Go to ‘Opportunities and Providers’.

Step Two
Click ‘Create Opportunity’.

Step Three 
Fill in all fields with details relevant to your opportunity. 

Step Four 
Click ‘Add’.