VM Role Permissions

Guide to Role Permissions in GC Volunteer Management

A volunteer role is a grouping of permissions that determines which constituents a volunteer can see/search/select, what data a volunteer can see in the VM, what a volunteer can do, and more. Volunteers must have at least one role in the VM in order to take any actions, and they can have more than one role! For more information on volunteers with more than one Role, checkout this article on Acts as Roles.

Who can this role see?

Within roles, you can set a role to be able to view All Constituents in your VM or you can use the Role Builder to define a configured bucket of constituents that will be visible on the “Search Constituents” page. 

The Role Builder can utilize three different types of conditions to determine who a volunteer should see on the Search Constituents page:

• Preferred Class Year - typically a 4-digit numerical value that is sent across in the Constituent File and included as part of the Volunteer Upload. A constituent can only have one Preferred Class Year.
• Affiliation Years - most commonly a combination of the constituent’s affiliation and a 4-digit class year (i.e. Alumni:1990). This value is sent across in both the constituent file (though it may be pulled from two separate columns, i.e. constituent_affiliation and constituent_affiliation year) and the volunteer file. Constituents can have multiple affiliation years, but these affiliation years cannot currently be used to determine reporting. 
• Constituent Cohort Membership - Cohorts are a tool within the Volunteer Management System that allow you to use data points sent across in your files to create custom groups of constituents. Cohorts should first be created on the “Cohorts” page. Once created, they can be applied to a Role’s permission set through the Role Builder, within the “Who this volunteer can see” section. 

With Role Builder, you can combine multiple conditions to arrive at the exact grouping of constituents that you’d like to appear on the Volunteer’s Search Constituents page. For example, you may choose to keep things simple and allow a role to see only “constituents who share a preferred class year with the volunteer”; or you could use more nuanced logic to view constituents who share a preferred class year with the volunteer and are in the Alumni cohort, but not the New York Region cohort. If you have any questions about how to use the Cohorts functionality, here is a GiveCampus University article with more information. Please note, you do need to be logged into your GiveCampus Administrator account to access GiveCampus University (GCU) articles. 

What can this role see?

Determining what each Volunteer Role can see is a two part process. The first is within the Role Settings page under the “What can this role see?” section. The second part is “Datapoints.” When creating a new role, you will be prompted to determine its “Datapoints” after clicking the “Save Role” button at the bottom of the screen. If you are modifying an existing role, the “Modify Datapoints” button is on the top right corner of the Role Settings page for each role. Datapoints determine what is visible on the “partial record” view and “full record” view of a Constituent Record. For more information on datapoints, check out this GCU article.

Within the primary Role Settings page, there are also a variety of options for the “What can this role see?” section.  The first (4) options all refer to visuals that appear on the “My Assignments” page of the Volunteer view:

In addition to the Assignment Snapshot view, the “What can this role see” permissions also determine some elements of the role’s views for reporting and display of Last Gift Information data.

What can this role do?

The “What can this role do” section determines the actions that volunteers with a specific role can take within the VM. Some of the most common differences in the “What can this role do” section fall within the “Allow Volunteer to Choose Assignment” options. Here you can choose how much freedom you’d like to provide to your volunteers in creating their Assignment lists. 

Selecting “Allow Volunteer To Choose Assignments,” allows you to then toggle between letting volunteers self-select assignments and requiring admin approval for assignments. Making one-click-assignments possible, unless the ask amount is above a certain level, can be a great option for minimizing friction for participation-level donors while ensuring that your leadership-level constituents are getting the best volunteer pairing for that individual.