How do we assign and sort volunteers?

In Marcato, “Type” corresponds to what we call “Area”.

When a volunteer signs up on the online form they select a work area. The list is populated from a list of TYPES built under the “Volunteer” section. For example, “Campsite Monitors” or “Cleaning & Waste : Table Top Troopers” are volunteer types.¹⁾

A capacity is set for each of the volunteer types (i.e. how many volunteers are needed in that area), and Marcato counts how many volunteers are assigned to that Type. That information is used to remove the volunteer type from the online list when capacity is reached -thereby stopping any more people from registering in that area.

Example: if the capacity of Artists : Central is 11 and 11 people have applied using the online application form, then the next person to view the form won’t see the Artists : Central option listed. Number of volunteers needed can sometimes be approximate – there may be some extra shifts to fill, or you may want another person on your team. No problem – volunteers can always be manually assigned to a Type even if that exceeds the set capacity.

When looking for specific volunteers using the search engine, select ‘Active’ and ‘Approved’ volunteers on Line 1 and …of [select the area] TYPE … on any team.

First a bit of history It's really important that we know how many people have signed up given the speed at which volunteers apply and available positions are filled. Why? Because we don't want to find that we have lots of people expecting to score a volunteer place with free entry who therefore haven't bought an entry ticket during Early Bird. In 2018 we allowed volunteers to signup for more than one area as we thought this was helpful to them. It resulted in us not knowing how many places we'd filled and being oversubscribed by 120+.

So now we use the capacity function associated with each volunteer Type to count how many of applied in that area. Before the next festival we need to reset each capacity counter, which means that everyone of a particular Type must be removed from that type.

To make it easy to invite volunteers back to any area we need to know what area they were in last year. While we can still remember what our volunteers did it's important to assign them to the right TEAM. For example, all Raffle volunteers would be assigned to the “Raffle 19” TEAM. Then, as part of the next year's recruitment, these people can be removed from the Raffle TYPE, so the counter is reset. Anyone who has already applied for this year through early rostering by an Area Manager, or by replying to a mailout, has to be scooped up and parked in a temporary team while the majority are removed from that type, and then re-imported, otherwise they won't be counted in the total numbers.

Example: At the end of the 2019 festival there were 4 volunteers in TYPE=Woodshed. Let's say that in November these people were all invited back for 2020 and that one accepted. At the same time, the Area Manager recruited a friend to fill another of the positions. So the capacity is already half full.

1. To reset the system all 4 volunteers must be assigned to TEAM = “Woodshed 19”
2. The two who have so far applied for 2020 have to be assigned to a temporary team “Woodshed Temp”. How do we identify these people? Having applied in different ways they won't all be tagged the same
3. All 4 then have their Woodshed type removed, so there will be no-one left in the system and assigned therefore = zero.
4. The two 2020 volunteers who are in TEAM “Woodshed Temp” are then assigned to TYPE “Woodshed” and the temp team is deleted.
5. Other people can apply through the public form where “Woodshed” will be included in the list of types (areas) until two more people have signed up, when 'Assigned' then equals 'Capacity' and th options will be removed.

A volunteer can’t sign up for a Team – these are allocated by an administrator. Having people in both Types and Teams has proved confusing for some Area Managers, so we’re now minimising use of Teams for a particular festival season.

In 2020 we’ve started to use TEAMS as the way of showing who was in an area in any particular year. This is the only use for most people. So we’ll look for all the volunteers of a particular type and assign them to a team. The Area Manager can then search for all volunteers who were for example in the “Face Painting 19” team to get their contact details. When Marcato is rolled forward to the next festival year the volunteer details are retained but not their itineraries, so there’s no easy way of seeing what someone did last year other than by their team listing. Ideally, each volunteer would only be in one team. GROUPS are simply a bunch of TEAMS. So searching for all Active and Approved volunteers … of Any type on Any team … that are in the group “Cleaning & Waste” will pull up all people who were in any (or all) of the Bin Ninjas team, or Table Top Troopers team, or Bindicoots team, and show in what year(s).