Enforcing minimum and maximum age requirements

When setting up an opportunity it asks for a minimum and maximum age requirement. However, volunteers that fall outside of those requirements are still able to sign up. When this happens there are no explicit indications that the individual does not meet the requirements. 


Those that fall outside of this should either not be able to sign up at all, or go to pending and require admin approval.



1 person likes this idea

Hi Lacey,


Thank you for your suggestion! The Minimum and Maximum Age fields are there to be descriptive, and they do not have the ability to block users who fall outside of the age range from responding. 


However, I am happy to tell you that we have a feature that allows you to block someone from responding until they approved by a Site Manager! This feature is Qualifications. Qualifications are roadblocks that you can set up for all or some of your Needs. One option is to set the user as "pending" when they respond to a Need, and they will not be able to respond to that Need until approved by a Site Manager. 


It sounds like your site would benefit from having a Qualification that stops users when they respond to an Opportunity, and sets them as "pending" until a Site Manager approves them. 


Here is some extra information going over Qualifications. If this sounds like a good option, please send us an email at support@galaxydigital.com and we can go over how this can work for you in greater detail. 


Thank you, and I look forward to hearing your feedback! 

Autum

I was given the workaround of adding an "Are you 18 or older?" qualification, which I am currently utilizing. I now have to approve every volunteer before they are able to sign up. I do understand that once 18 this qualification is set to last forever, however, many of our volunteers are with organizations doing once a year volunteer opportunity -college students that will only come once or twice in their lifetime. This means I am constantly having to go through and approve volunteers. The point of having volunteer software is to make my job easier, not harder.


I don't understand the point of having a minimum and maximum age restriction if it does nothing to restrict the volunteer from signing up. The qualification is extremely time-consuming for me and volunteers are unable to sign up until I have qualified them. This means they have to go back in later and add themselves after getting the email saying they are qualified. Unfortunately, many wait until the last minute to sign up so I have to also add them to the opportunity on-site or we lose out on crucial volunteers.


The qualification is not an efficient use of time...


1 person likes this

Hi Lacey, 


Thank you for explaining your use case in more detail! 


The minimum and maximum age fields are used for communicating details about the Need, and not restricting access to the Need. We have found for many people who use our software, admins will want to recommend an age of 16 or older but will in fact be happy to work with a 15 year old if they are a family member of a regular volunteer for example. 


Qualifications is our tool when you want to restrict a volunteer's behavior. The other factor we've considered here is if the minimum age field was a requirement, that if a person was 15 and saw the age restriction, they could easily alter their birthday to bypass the requirement. This is why Qualifications is used to restrict behaviors. 


If you aren't as worried about verifying the person's age, you could set the qualification to Auto Approve. That way you don't have to manually approve each person. This might save some time! Please let me know if you would like to go this route, and I'd be happy to send over instructions. 


I'm happy to document your request that the minimum/maximum age fields on a Need become a requirement that checks the volunteer's profile before allowing them to respond for consideration by the development team, so please know, we will advocate for this idea like we do all our client ideas. I just want to make sure that I am providing you with everything the software can currently do!


Thank you again!

Autum

I'm running into the same issues as Lacey! With over 100 agencies on our site and one site manager, it is not feasible for me to approve each volunteer for every need that has a minimum or maximum age requirement. I understand the age fields are currently set up as descriptors but it would be so much easier if that could be updated rather than putting the onus on the Site Managers and creating qualifications. An alternative would be to let Agency Managers approve qualifications but I still feel that updating the age fields to restrict sign ups would be best.

Hi Amelea, 


Thank you for adding your voice! I think I am missing a puzzle piece however. Can you talk to me a little bit more about the differences you see between an auto approved qualification and the need field for age being updated in the way you've suggested? Always trying to understand as much as we can. 


Thanks!

Ali

I could have a misunderstanding of qualifications... If the qualification is set to auto-approve how does that stop someone under the age of 18 from being approved?

Hi Amelea, 


You are correct, that was a plot hole in our solution. However! It is no longer a problem. We just released a new update to the system today that allows you to choose a correct answer for auto approving qualifications. This means you could set it up to say "Are you 18 years or older?" and anyone who answers yes, would be auto approved, and anyone who answers no, would not be! 


Here is a video that talks about this update to the software. 


I hope you like this change! 


Ali

Wonderful, thank you!

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