Managing Shifts

Shifts are the building blocks of volunteer scheduling. As event staff you create and manage shifts, fill them manually when needed, and monitor coverage through the schedule view.

Creating a shift

Navigate to Shifts → New Shift within an event.

Required fields:

Shift type — must exist before creating the shift; create types under Shift Types
Start and end time — must fall within the event's buildup/teardown window
Capacity — maximum number of volunteers

Optional fields:

Location — where the shift takes place
Description — shown to volunteers on the sign-up screen; use for instructions, required equipment, or meeting point
Goodie multiplier — overrides the shift type's multiplier for this specific shift
Minimum age — restricts sign-up to volunteers who meet the requirement
Compliance items — inherited from the shift type; override here if this specific shift needs different requirements

Shift type capacity defaults

Shift types support Capacity Defaults — a set of required volunteer types and slot counts defined on the type itself. When you create a new shift of that type, those capacity slots are automatically inherited, saving you from entering them manually each time.

Configure capacity defaults under Shift Types → edit a type → Capacity Defaults section.

If a shift has no description of its own, it inherits the shift type's description as a fallback. The Shift Type and Location fields in shift forms use searchable combobox dropdowns rather than plain selects.

Editing and deleting shifts

Open any shift from the shift list to edit capacity, timing, location, and description. Changes take effect immediately for all volunteers who have already signed up. The delete button is also accessible directly from the shift list view, without needing to open the shift first.

Deleting a shift removes all sign-up records. Volunteers are not automatically notified — send a broadcast or message before deleting if the shift had sign-ups.

Bulk editing shifts

Click Bulk edit on the Shifts page to select and edit many shifts at once. Use Select all filtered to select every shift matching the current filter, or check individual shifts in the list view to build a custom selection.

In the bulk-edit dialog you can change any shift field except start/end time — title, shift type, location, description, goodie multiplier, and (when alerts are enabled) minimum helpers and alert settings. Each field has its own checkbox: only the fields you explicitly enable are applied, so unchecked fields are left untouched on every selected shift.

Use the separate Shift by control to move all selected shifts earlier or later by a number of minutes, hours, or days — each shift's duration is preserved exactly, since both the start and end time shift by the same offset.

Before anything is written, a confirmation dialog shows the number of affected shifts and a before/after preview table of every change. Nothing is saved until you click Confirm; closing or cancelling the dialog discards all changes. Volunteers already signed up to an affected shift receive the same shift-change notification (opt-in email + in-app message) as if the shift had been edited individually.

Assigning volunteers manually

From the shift detail page, use the assignment panel to search for enrolled volunteers and add them directly without them needing to self-sign-up. Useful for:

Filling last-minute gaps on-site
Moving a volunteer from a cancelled shift to an open one
Assigning helpers who arrived without a pre-booked shift

You can also remove a volunteer from a shift from the same panel, bypassing the cancellation cutoff.

Both the candidate search and the assigned volunteer list show each volunteer's preferred display name in parentheses after their full name (e.g. "Jordan Miller (JoJo)"), so you can recognize and address them by the name they actually go by.

Marking shifts complete

After a shift ends, mark individual volunteers as having completed it from the shift detail page or the participant list. Completed shifts credit hours toward the volunteer's tracked total and goodie tier progress.

No-show escalation (relay, not reveal)

If a volunteer doesn't show up for a shift, mark them as a no-show from the shift's assignment panel (the same "Mark as No-Show" control used above). This does two things automatically:

It logs the no-show to an audit trail (who marked it, when, and an optional note).
It notifies every Volunteer Coordinator for the event with an in-app notification (and an email if they haven't opted out of urgency alerts).

This is a deliberate boundary: Area Leads and other staff who hold shift-management access but not standing contact access can flag a no-show, but they never see the volunteer's email or phone number. Following up — calling or emailing the volunteer — is always done by a Volunteer Coordinator, who already has contact-tier access. Volunteer Coordinators resolve an escalation by recording who they contacted, when, and the outcome (reached, no answer, excused, or backfilled) from the participants view.

Not every no-show goes through this flow — a Coordinator may also notice one directly or hear about it in person. The escalation exists specifically so a no-show tagged in the system is never silently missed.

The timetable

Timetable shows all shifts as a calendar timeline. Use it to:

Spot uncovered time windows
Check for capacity gaps (a shift with 2/10 slots filled is highlighted differently from 9/10)
Identify overlapping shifts of the same type that might pull from the same volunteer pool

The day filter is a From/To day range selector rather than a single dropdown. When multiple days are selected, the timetable stacks them vertically with a day label (e.g. "Mon, Jun 2") before each day's block of hours. The day range covers the event's full buildup-to-teardown window when those dates are configured, not just the event start/end days. Location and type filter dropdowns are alphabetically sorted and searchable.

By default the timetable shows the full day, starting at 00:00, so early-morning shifts are not hidden. The From/To time filter is a daily time-of-day window: a shift is shown when its hours overlap that window on any day it runs, so shifts that cross midnight are included or excluded the same way as any other shift instead of always being shown. If active filters are hiding shifts within the selected day range, a small notice appears above the timetable telling you how many are hidden, with a one-click reset.

Volunteer types

Navigate to Volunteer Types within an event to manage the categories that volunteers can belong to (e.g. "Security", "Bar", "Technical Crew").

Each volunteer type has:

Name and optional Description shown to volunteers on the sign-up screen
Contact person — the coordinator volunteers can message about this type
Restricted — requires coordinator approval before a volunteer's membership is confirmed
Self-signup allowed — whether volunteers can request membership themselves, or only be assigned by staff
Visible to volunteers & public — when turned off, the type becomes staff-only: it is hidden from the public event page, the volunteer shift browser, and the My Volunteer Types page. Only admins and coordinators can see it. Use this for internal roles such as "Finances" or "On-call duty" that should not be visible to the general volunteer pool.

Staff-only types are marked with a Staff only badge in the volunteer types list so they are easy to identify at a glance.

The add member picker and the confirmed members list under each type also show each volunteer's preferred display name in parentheses after their full name, matching the assignment panel above. The pending-members list and the contact person picker on the volunteer type form show the same "Full Name (Display Name)" treatment.

Export and import the shift plan

Event staff can download the full shift plan as a file, edit it offline, and upload it back.

Export

Two buttons are available on the Shifts page: Export XLSX and Export CSV. The XLSX export contains two sheets: Shifts and Volunteer Types. The CSV export is a flat file with one row per shift and one column per volunteer type for capacity counts.

Import

Click Import and select an edited XLSX or CSV file.
A preview dialog appears showing detected changes: added (green), changed (amber), and removed (red) shifts.
If no changes are detected you can cancel without applying.
Click Apply Changes to commit all changes in a single transaction.

Validation: The import is blocked if any added or changed shift has no volunteer type capacity assigned, or if the end time is not after the start time. Fix the issues shown in the warning banner before applying.

Limits: Maximum file size is 5 MB. Only the first 500 rows are processed.

Note: Shifts are matched by ID when the file was exported from HoMeeSuite (survives title/time edits). Files without an ID column fall back to matching by title + start time. Shift type and location names must match exactly the names configured in the event; rows with unrecognised names are skipped and reported as warnings.

Alerts

When the event has alerts enabled:

Set a fill threshold percentage on the shift type (e.g. 80)
Add alert recipients — email addresses that receive a notification when the threshold is crossed

You can override the threshold or recipients on a specific shift if a single high-priority shift needs different alerting than its type default.

The alert recipients picker (on both the shift type and shift forms) shows each selectable user's preferred display name in parentheses after their full name, and matches your search against either name.