When you partner with agencies in your community, you can allow them to post needs and manage volunteers autonomously. As the Site Manager, you can decide which changes to your site (made by an Agency Manager) require your approval. Let's learn more:
Why Approvals Matter
On your Site Settings page (the same page where you saw Site Design earlier) you’ll find the Approval section about halfway down the page on the left.
This area is vitally important to the setup of your site. It is where you determine what agency activities need to be approved by you, or which actions you are willing to have auto-approved. For example, do you want agencies to be able to post needs without your approval? That will depend on the use case of your individual United Way.
The default settings in the site are configured to auto-approve most actions. It will likely look like this if you have not made changes:
If you want to review things before the public can see them, you have some toggling to do. If you want to approve new agencies, needs, events, or profile updates before they can be publicly displayed on your site, toggle any of those fields to OFF.
Approvals for Site and Agency Levels
We strongly recommend that United Ways require approval of new agencies that want to appear on your site. United Way sites are often popular with local non-profits who want their information and needs posted to your site. You will want to make sure what is appearing on your site is appropriate and vetted.
You can toggle the “Auto Approve New Agencies” to OFF. So your configuration would look like this:
This setup would work well for a United Way if you have established agencies that you trust to post volunteer opportunities to their page, but you don’t want just anyone to create an account and start posting without your review.
For details on how this works, this link will jump you to the Approvals section of the article on managing your site settings.
So what’s that section for Hours Approval?
Approvals for Volunteer Hours
Below the toggle buttons for approval settings, you’ll see a dropdown for Hours Approval. The first option requires an additional step by volunteers. We recommend staying away from that option unless you have a specific reason for selecting it. Most United Ways would not use that option.
What is the best option for you? That depends on how you plan to use your site and your need for control of hours submissions. Your site is initially set up so that a volunteer logs their hours, then those hours come to you for approval. For most sites, this default setting is fine.
But some United Ways have large projects with dozens or hundreds or thousands of volunteers submitting hours. If you or your agency managers feel like this would be a massive number of submissions, you may want to choose the third option of allowing hours to be automatically approved. The article Setup Options for Submitting Volunteer Hours lays out some details.
If you are having trouble deciding, take a look at this article on Approving Volunteer Hours to see if this step is right for you.