Roles are a grouping of permissions that determine “what a volunteer can see", "what a volunteer can do", and "who a volunteer can see”. With Constituent Cohorts the “who a volunteer can see” permission is more configurable than ever!
Building a Cohort
Cohorts are a functionality available exclusively to Administrators. When logged in as an Administrator, head to the “Manage Volunteers" section from the left navigation bar > Cohorts” tab. To create new cohort, click “Create New Cohort” in the top right corner. Cohorts are comprised of a few key elements:
Condition - these are categories by which you’re defining the groups of constituents. Conditions will appear dynamically based on what information is sent across in the data files you share with GiveCampus. If provided, the following are the available conditions: Activity, Affiliation, Ask Amount, Class Year, Donor Status, Home Address (state), and Segment Code (which is a custom data point defined in your onboarding or during a reconfiguration).
Groups - groups allow you to combine conditions that do not impact other elements of the cohort logic. For example, if you had the following cohort logic:
The result of the above would be all parents, all alumni, all of 2024 and all of 1980. However, by using groups, you could have this cohort logic:
The results are now much more precise, in that the cohort would include only Alumni with a year of 1980 and Parents with a year of 2024.
Groups are a fantastic tool for combining many different conditions without needing to create a different cohort for each related condition. One creative use that we’ve seen is to use groups to create differentiated leadership levels. For example, if you’d like to build a cohort of leadership level prospects, but your leadership levels are tiered based on class year, you could create a cohort with a group for each year range and the associated Ask Amount that qualifies that year range as a leadership prospect.
And/Or - Within Constituent Cohorts, there are two different types of logic that you can apply to combine conditions “And” or “Or”. In Constituent Cohorts, these read as “At least one condition must be met”, which is the “Or” logic; and as “All conditions must be met”, which is the “And” logic.
Generally, an “All conditions must be met” will return a narrower pool of constituents while “Any of the conditions must be met” will return a broader group of constituents. For example
The above Constituent Cohort uses the “All Conditions must be met” logic, so to appear in this Cohort, the constituent must both be an alumnus/a AND be in the Class of 1980.
Meanwhile, if the same conditions are combined with “At least one condition must be met”:
This Constituent Cohort would include all alumni and all members of the class of 1980.
Applying Cohorts to Roles
Once a Cohort is built, you will then be able to build out the “Who this role can see” permissions for any Volunteer Role. On the “Roles” page, you’ll see a “Role Builder” that looks similar to the Constituent Cohort builder. From this Role Builder, you can determine which Cohorts a Volunteer Role should see, should not see, and if there are any class-year permissions that need to be taken into consideration.
If your role should be able to see all constituents in GiveCampus Volunteer Management, you can select the checkbox to allow for this permission:
Once you uncheck this box, you will see the role builder options display. Conditions for Role builder are around three areas:
- Cohorts
- Preferred Class Year
- Affiliation Year (if applicable)
As with Constituent Cohorts, in Role Builder you can use groups as well as AND/OR logic to create exactly the permissions that you'd like to enable for your Volunteers. A very common combination is to select a Cohort and make it such that volunteers can only see constituents within the Cohort who share their same class year.
Once you have configured your Role Builder conditions, click "Save Role" at the bottom of the Roles page.
Viewing and Modifying a Constituent Cohort
Once your Cohort has been created, you can view the Cohort at any time from the "Constituent Cohort" page. Clicking on the Cohort name from the Constituent Cohorts page will allow you to view the constituents who comprise that Cohort along with some basic information.
If you'd like to make changes to the Cohort, you can click "Modify Cohort" from the main Constituents Cohort page. Changes made to the Cohort will update the "Who this role can see" permissions for any Role using that cohort.