We have always utilized Advanced Events and for our most recent volunteer event we tried Initiatives.  One of the issues we experienced was the inability to add a volunteer to a shift who does not have an account in the system.  I reviewed the documentation and understand this is how the system is currently configured and is a difference between Advanced Events and Initiatives.  We often have volunteers who call and wish to volunteer but do not wish to create an account or provide an e-mail.  The inability to add a volunteer to a shift when utilizing Initiatives may prevent us from utilizing Initiatives. 

Modifying the Initiatives system configuration to allow a volunteer to be added to a shift without an account would remove this barrier from utilizing Initiatives instead of Advanced Events.

This might also be a potential solution for clients who have a fixed volunteer base (like a business) but also want to allow friends and family to volunteer. That way, it would avoid creating accounts for the friends and family (and avoid those friends and family accessing the volunteer portal).

I can also tell you as I am preparing for our yearly day of service and am attempting to manage with initiatives vs advanced events, I have already noticed one downside.  It is very important to me that each project have a contact person named.  With advanced events, I can add specific questions that each agency is required to answer, with initiatives I cannot.  This is going to make it more difficult to discern the information I need to be included in each project submission.  I am going to have to ask each agency specifically who the contact person is and there is no place except attributes where I can add that information.  I also find the framework for an opportunity in an advanced event seems to be more geared for a day event over the general opportunity posting.  Also, I found it easier to send an invitation to the advanced event to specific agencies.  With initiatives, there is no canned invitation and it is harder to pull out individual agencies I want to invite.  I can only filter out agency managers.  Let me know if I am missing something here.   

The custom question enhancement was great!  I was able to take advantage of it before too many agencies had submitted projects for my day of service.  Now I have hit another roadblock in the initiative vs advanced event saga....:>).....what replaces the waiver input for agencies and users?  I had three documents loaded in the "document"section of last year's Day of service that involved photo waivers and general waivers for agencies and volunteers.  How can I ensure everyone taking part in this year's day of service agrees to these waivers?  Am I missing a capability to solve this problem that escapes me?  Thanks for your help! 

Hi there,

The only way I can pull up a report that will give me t-shirt sizes for my day of service (using initiatives) is the full Initiative report that converts to an Excel spreadsheet correct?  With Advanced Events, I was able to pull up responses by agency that included the answer to the AV volunteer questions which made it very nice as I was putting together the T-shirt packages for each agency the week before the event. Now I need to extract the data from a massive initiative response spreadsheet.  Is there any way you can include the initiative questions to the responses attached to the initiative?        

Yes I can.  It is not so much that the information is missing however it is the lack of capability of pulling out responses by agency.  When I put together packages for each agency participating in my Day Of Service., I pack up a bag with all the t-shirts that are associated with their project.  With advanced events, I was able to pull up a report individually with each agency, print off a sheet with the responses, including the t-shirt sizes, and include this in the bag for their reference.  Now, in order to do that, I have to pull up one big massive report with hundreds of names on it, export it to excel, sort it, then cut and paste to another document in order to achieve the same thing and produce a document I can include with their t-shirt package.  Does that make sense?

It would be great for GD to come up with a solution - using the best features of AE and Initiatives - to plan services days. For a service day, perhaps there can be a quick sign up by need or shift, which asks the volunteer to sign up with just 3 fields - first/last name, email and phone #. Thanks for taking this into consideration!