Jan 23, 2018
From the very beginning we have been keen to utilise the Parent/Teacher interview booking system for so much more than just booking interviews with teachers. Over the years we have added booking with pre-selected staff for career counselling and enrolment interviews. We also added event management to help with booking seats for school performances. We now have volunteer bookings to help manage parents volunteering at school events.
How does it differ
The main difference with volunteer booking is that the parent does not need to enter any child details.
The secondary difference is the replacement of teachers with volunteer roles. For example, the school fair may require parents to help with the cafe or the jumping castle – you can configure these roles within the interview round while also specifying the number of parents required in each time slot.
Configuration
Click the button to “Add a booking round”. (This is only available to SOBS Administrators).
Select “Volunteer booking” from the list of booking methods.
You will also specify the access dates and times for parents to book.
Once the round is created you can then define the volunteer roles. Click on the “Roles” row to define each volunteer role for your event.
You can always come back and add more roles later.
The next step is to create time slots for each role. Different roles can have different time slots and different numbers of parents volunteering.
To create (or manage) the time slots, firstly select the role from the “ROLE OPTIONS”:
After you select the role the next two rows will allow you to manage the time slots and volunteers that have booked in.
As you can see there are currently no time slots for this role, so “Click this row to manage the time slots for this role”. The screen will change to a list of dates (and any existing time slots) for the currently selected role.
Use the “Add slots for …” button to add time slots for this role. The popup dialog allows you to create multiple time slots at once, select a starting time, a duration for each time slot, an ending time, and a capacity (this is the number of volunteers you would like to book in for each time slot). If the booking round spans multiple days you can repeat the creation of the time slots across each day.
You can modify the capacity for each time slot, or delete time slots as necessary. The button to add additional time slots is also still available.
Volunteer booking
The parents can then access the booking system in exactly the same way that they would book parent/teacher interviews. The same authentication options are available. Please ensure you provide your parents with the correct URL, preferably by providing the link on your website. It should look something like: https://sobs.com.au/pt3/parent.php?schoolid=123 (the 123 will be different for each school).
Parents can of course volunteer in multiple time slots, however they will not be able to create concurrent bookings as they can not be in two places at once. If both parents are wanting to volunteer then the second parent should register separately.
Emails and Reporting
The reporting options includes those by volunteer, by role and by time.
There is also an option to email each volunteer with their bookings and an optional message.