How to sign volunteers in & out using laptops on the day of an event

Hi there! Volunteer.Legal can be used to sign volunteers in & out (using laptops) on the day of an event. These pages do not require an internet connection to function. The primary advantages of using the sign in & out pages instead of using paper are:

1. New, unregistered volunteers showing up on the day of the event can use the sign in page to both register and sign in. This automatically adds the new volunteer to the event on Volunteer.Legal, marks them as attended, and, if they indicate they wish to be notified about future events, automatically adds them to the appropriate volunteer list--saving the volunteer coordinator a bunch of admin work & ensuring that the information of these walk-ins is not lost.
2. Volunteers signing in and/or out are automatically marked as attended and have the time they signed in and/or out recorded in Volunteer.Legal. If both a sign in and out time are recorded for volunteers, you have the ability to accurately calculate the number of donated volunteer hours.

The volunteer sign in and sign out pages, specifically, can be accessed using either the latest version of Google's Chrome browser or the latest version of Mozilla's Firefox browser from a computer running either Windows, Mac, Linux, or Chrome OS. A windows tablet might work, but an android tablet won't (at least I don't think it will). To find the sign in & sign out pages for your event, log into Volunteer.Legal and navigate to:

1. The "Events" tab
2. Select the appropriate event
3. In the bottom toolbar, select the "Coordinate" button to navigate to "Coordinate" page.
4. In the bottom toolbar, select the "Assignments" button to navigate to the "Assignments" page.
5. In the bottom toolbar, use either the "Sign In Page" button or "Sign Out Page" button to navigate to the appropriate page

To keep things simple and avoid volunteer confusion, a different page is used to sign volunteers into an event vs sign them out of an event. At some point during the event, you'll need to switch laptops over from displaying the "Sign In Page" to displaying the "Sign Out Page."

So this is how the pages work: when you first load either the sign in page or the sign out page, the page saves all of the volunteer information related to your event to the laptop, allowing that information to be used in the future without an internet connection. When volunteers use the sign in or out page at an event, the laptop saves that information locally to the laptop (regardless of whether or not it currently has an internet connection). This information will be retained even after the browser is quit or the laptop restarted. If you reload the sign in page or sign out page a second or subsequent time, the page first checks to see if there is an internet connection. If there is not, the page loads normally using whatever volunteer info it already has saved. If there is an internet connection, the page connects to Volunteer.Legal and, first, uploads any information saved on the laptop to the website, then it erases the information saved locally and downloads new, up to date volunteer information from the website. To reiterate: volunteer sign in / out information is not uploaded to the website as volunteers sign in. Instead, you need to *reload* the sign in / sign out pages to upload the information to the website. You have three months after an event to upload the information, otherwise it will be deleted from the laptop and not uploaded.

Here is the workflow I recommend for using the sign in / sign out pages:

1. Even if you think you'll have internet at the event, I highly recommend you preload the laptops with volunteer information the day before. I can't tell you the number of times I've been at events where either the internet is spotty (at best) or the internet is password protected and it turns out the one person with the password isn't around or the password no longer works. So I'll reiterate, preload the volunteer information on the laptops. Another problem that could arise if you don't preload the information before the event: you could find out that the laptops don't have a supported web browser. This being said, it should be obvious that any volunteer changes to an event that take place after the sign in / out pages have been loaded won't be saved to the laptops.
	1. The sign in and sign out pages have unique URL's, so people aren't going to guess them, but the pages can actually be accessed without needing to log into Volunteer.Legal. This is useful, because the person / organization supplying the laptops for your event might not have a volunteer.legal account. You can email them the sign in / sign out links for the event, and they can open those links up on the laptops the day before the event to load them up with volunteer information.
2. Also, for the day of the event, make sure you have the URL (the exact web address) of the sign in / sign out pages written down. If there isn't internet at the workshop, you won't be able to use the internet to look up the link to the page. If you have it written down, you can just manually enter it into the web browser to navigate to the sign in / sign out pages.
3. Place the laptops at the volunteer sign in area in the morning and load the volunteer sign in page. Both Google Chrome and Firefox have a "Full screen browsing" mode you can activate, which hides the browser's navigation & tab bar. Obviously, this increases the screen real estate and reduces visual clutter for volunteers, but it also helps ensure that a volunteer doesn't close the browser window or navigate to a different page. For an event of 200 people, you'll probably want 4 laptops for sign in.
4. After the initial stampede of folks signing in in the morning, switch one laptop from displaying the sign in page to displaying the sign out page. Any folks leaving early can use this laptop. As the day wears on, switch more laptops to displaying the sign out page.
5. After the event takes place and when you have an internet connection--either later that day or sometime the following week--get each laptop and navigate back to both the volunteer sign in and volunteer sign out pages for this event. Reload the pages and the information saved to the laptops will be uploaded to Volunteer.Legal and recorded.

So having written all of this, I'll point out the obvious that there are always unforeseen things that come up. At one event I know of, the laptop fatally crashed, had to be restarted, and at least some of the volunteer sign in information seemed to have been lost. If you use paper, you always have that record of it. Using a laptop, if a bug pops up or there is some other unforeseen event, it's possible you'll lose the volunteer information on that laptop before you have a chance to upload it. The first time you try out the laptops, I recommend you bring paper sign in sheets to the event as a backup, just in case something goes wrong. After you get comfortable using the laptops, you can ditch the paper entirely.