Volunteer List

In volunteer.legal, a "Volunteer List" is basically an email list. Each volunteer list is owned by an organizer. An organizer is either a specific nonprofit organization, or a collaborative comprised of multiple nonprofit organizations. Every staff user who is a member of the volunteer list's organizer has full administrative access to the volunteer list.

1. EXAMPLE: If a volunteer list is owned by your nonprofit organization, than every staff user on volunteer.legal associated with your organization will see the volunteer list (and all the volunteers on it), and has full administrative abilities for it. Staff at other nonprofit organizations will not be able to see your volunteer list, nor will they have administrative access to it.
2. EXAMPLE: If a volunteer list is owned by a collaborative, then every staff user of every organization that is a member of that collaborative has the ability to see and administer the volunteer list (and all the volunteers on it). In practice, staff at an organization are often only participating in a subset of the collaboratives that their organization is a member off. Individual staff choose which collaboratives they, personally, wish to be a part of, selecting from the list of collaboratives that their organization is a part of. Staff users at organizations which are not part of your collaborative, cannot administer volunteer lists associated with your collaborative and cannot see volunteer lists associated with your collaborative (nor can they see / administer anything else associated with your collaborative).

As a staff user of Volunteer.Legal, you can arbitrarily create volunteer lists associated with your nonprofit organization or any collaboratives you are a member of. You can administratively add and remove volunteers from any volunteer list you have access to. You can email volunteers on any or all of the volunteer lists you have access to.

It is important to understand that a volunteer list is separate and different from the volunteers that have signed up for an event. A volunteer list is a list of people that have indicated they wish to receive more information from you, via email, about upcoming events and whatnot. Volunteers which have signed up to participate in an event have, hopefully, ALSO joined one of your volunteer lists (indeed, volunteers are prompted to join one of your volunteer lists as they sign up for an event), but they do not need to do this and have not necessarily chosen to do this. There will be some volunteers that just sign up for your event, and never want to be contacted by you about anything other than this one event. Because of this, you cannot use volunteer.legal to send an email to all of the volunteers of a past event and invite them to sign up for a future event (you would be spamming some people). What you can do, is send an email to your volunteer lists, asking the volunteers on those lists to sign up for a future event.

Each volunteer list has its own sign up page which volunteers can use to "subscribe" to the list and get it's email.

### Volunteer List related guides:

* How to create a volunteer list
* How to edit a volunteer list
* How to delete a volunteer list
* How to access the public sign up page for a volunteer list
* How to email volunteers on volunteer lists
* How to administratively add volunteers to a volunteer list
* How to administratively remove volunteers from a volunteer list
* How to export / download a volunteer list as a spreadsheet file