Getting Started Guide

Hi there! So you're a staff member who will be using volunteer.legal to coordinate volunteers for immigration workshops.

Volunteer.legal is a free web application made expressly for coordinating the volunteers of immigration workshops (Naturalization, DACA, General Screening~~, and, hopefully, DAPA~~). It isn't intended to be used for any other purpose. You can read more about the creation of volunteer.legal in the About section, but there's a few important things you should know before you use it:

1. Volunteer.legal has been made entirely by 1 person, John Carroll, as a volunteer project. The project has no financial sponsors at this time. All associated costs are being / have been paid by John. John has made volunteer.legal freely available to nonprofits because he believes its the right thing to do. John has no plans to charge nonprofit organizations for the right to use volunteer.legal, nor does he wish to do so. However, this could change at any time.
2. Because volunteer.legal is a free project, it doesn't have a lot of resources compared to a for-profit application. Some things, like sending a very large email blast (think 10,000+ emails), can take over an hour to complete (and if multiple organizations send large email blasts around the same time, the last email could be sent several hours after someone initially pressed the "send" button). John hopes to reduce this time in the future.
	1. UPDATE: This doesn't appear to be a problem. 20+ organizations are now using Volunteer.Legal around the country and no one has reported any issues. (though this may be because no one has sent an email blast to over 10,000 subscribers at one time yet).
3. **There is no tech support other than this website. *This website was designed as a wiki so that everyone can contribute to it and make it better.* Please volunteer some of your time to improve / add to this wiki if you see a problem or have any ideas you can contribute (simply click "edit" on any page).**
4. John does not back up the volunteer.legal database.
	1. You are responsible for backing up information as appropriate. You can download volunteer lists and event volunteers as spreadsheet files from within volunteer.legal. See How to Export / Download Volunteer Information.
	2. Obviously no one wants something to go wrong with volunteer.legal, but if something does go wrong, all of the data on the website can be lost.
5. Volunteer.legal has been designed with collaboration in mind and, because of this, a lot of information can be, or is, shared among users and organizations.
	1. Volunteer profiles are shared among organizations. If you edit a volunteer's profile, you are also editing the profile for everyone else who uses volunteer.legal. Because of this, a malicious actor could have a hugely negative impact on volunteer.legal and screw it up for many organizations. Be thoughtful about who you give access to the system.
	2. An organization (or collaborative) only gets access to a volunteer's profile when that volunteer signs up to serve with the organization. If a volunteer never signs up with an organization, that organization will not gain access to the volunteer's profile.

Now on to actually using volunteer.legal:

1. If *your organization* already has an account on volunteer.legal, great! If not, see How to add a new organization to volunteer.legal.
2. ***IMPORTANT!!***: As an additional step, make sure your organization has completed the steps listed in "How to give volunteer.legal permission to send your organization's emails". Following these steps is required before you use volunteer.legal to coordinate real volunteers (basically before you use Volunteer.Legal to send any emails). Failure to do so will result in some emails to volunteers being marked as spam. You can test out the system (though not with real volunteers) before completing this step.
3. If *you personally* already have an account on volunteer.legal, great! If not, see How to add staff member accounts to your organization.
4. Navigate to www.volunteer.legal and log in. You will be taken to the events page. Note: staff users of Volunteer.Legal must use the latest version of Google's Chrome Browser on a desktop computer, other web browsers will not work. Volunteer users of Volunteer.Legal can use whatever web browser they like, on whatever device they like.
	1. If this is your first time logging in, you will be taken to your profile page. To navigate to the events page, simply click "Events" in the left hand menu.
	2. In volunteer.legal, an "Event" is an immigration workshop. Each event has 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 event's organizer has full administrative access to the event.
		1. To learn more about Events on Volunteer.Legal, read the Event page.
	3. In volunteer.legal, an "Orientation" is an ***in-person*** training that people need to have completed before they can volunteer at an event. An Orientation is always associated with a specific event.
		1. To learn more about Orientations in Volunteer.Legal read the Orientation page.

### **If your organization has already been using Volunteer.Legal read this (otherwise scroll down):**

1. You may already see events listed on the events page. If there are events listed here already, feel free to click on them and explore the various pages. You probably don't want to edit / change anything without getting permission from the relevant volunteer coordinator first though.
	1. If you don't see any events on the events page, and your organization has already been using Volunteer.Legal, it is probably because your organization has been using Volunteer.Legal as part of a collaborative and the events are all associated with the collaborative rather than your organization. To see these events, you will need to join the collaborative.
		1. To learn how to join a collaborative, read How to join a collaborative.
		2. After joining a collaborative, you will be able to see (and edit) any events / volunteer lists / emails associated with the collaborative.
2. Next, click on the "Volunteers" link in the left hand menu. The volunteers page contains all of the volunteer lists you have access to on the left side pane, and all of the volunteers on those lists on the right side pane.
3. In volunteer.legal, a "Volunteer List" is basically a volunteer 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 owner has full administrative access to the volunteer list.
	1. To learn more about Volunteer Lists on Volunteer.Legal, read the Volunteer List page.
4. Click on a volunteer list to filter the right side pane and only view the volunteers on that list. Click on another volunteer list (if you have multiple volunteer lists) to filter the right side pane and only view volunteers on either of the selected lists. Volunteer.Legal will only show a volunteer once, even if they appear on multiple selected lists. Click on a volunteer list again to de-select it. If no volunteer lists are selected, Volunteer.Legal will show you all of the volunteers on all of the volunteer lists (so selecting no volunteer lists is the same as selecting ALL of the volunteer lists).
5. Having clicked around Volunteer.Legal a bit, you might want to set up an upcoming event:
	1. How to create an event
	2. How to invite volunteers to sign up for an event
6. **Show me all of the learning information for Volunteer.Legal**
7. **In the future, after you have already used Volunteer.Legal to organize an immigration workshop and you are ready to learn about some of its advanced features, you can read the Advanced Users Guide.**

### **If your organization is new to Volunteer.Legal:**

1. If your organization is new to Volunteer.Legal, there won't be any of your information already in the system and you'll need to set some things up.
	1. First off, make sure your organization completes the steps in this guide before you use Volunteer.Legal to interact with real volunteers: How to give volunteer.legal permission to send your organization's emails.
	2. Secondly, each organization on Volunteer.Legal has one user designated as the Administrator. The main responsibility of the administrator is approving new Volunteer.Legal staff accounts for your organization. The first staff account created for an organization (this might be you) is automatically made the administrator.
		1. You can see the admin user for your organization by logging into Volunteer.Legal and navigating to settings > organization > then scrolling down.
		2. If you are the admin for your organization, read this Getting Started as an Administrator Guide (and also finish reading this guide).
	3. Thirdly, will you be using Volunteer.Legal to organize collaborative events? Or, is your organization part of a collaborative that already uses Volunteer.Legal to organize its events?
		1. If yes to either question: has someone at another collaborative partner organization already started using Volunteer.Legal to organize this collaboratives events? You may want to shoot off some emails and ask around.
			1. If yes, this means that someone else has already created this collaborative in Volunteer.Legal, and, rather than recreating the collaborative yourself, you need to have them add your organization to the already existing collaborative. Call up the organization that created the collaborative (or any organization with a Volunteer.Legal account that has already been added to the collaborative) and ask them to add your organization to the collaborative.
				1. How to add organizations to a collaborative
				2. Once your organization is added to the collaborative, you will want to add your staff account to the collaborative (which is a separate step--not all the staff members of your organization may want to participate in every collaborative your organization is a member of). See the "How to add staff members to a collaborative" section to learn more.
			2. If no, this means that it is appropriate for you to create a new collaborative in Volunteer.Legal for your collaborative. You should go ahead and create the collaborative in Volunteer.Legal now.
				1. How to create a collaborative
		2. If no, you just want to use Volunteer.Legal to organize in-house events (at this time), great! On to the next step.
	4. Next, click on the "Volunteers" link in the left hand menu. The volunteers page contains all of the volunteer lists you have access to on the left side pane, and all of the volunteers on those lists on the right side pane. Currently, this page is empty for you (unless you've added yourself to a collaborative that already has activity).
		1. In volunteer.legal, a "Volunteer List" is basically a volunteer 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 owner has full administrative access to the volunteer list.
			1. To learn more about Volunteer Lists on Volunteer.Legal, read the Volunteer List page.
	5. You're going to want to create the first volunteer list for either your organization or the collaborative you set up. See How to create a volunteer list.
		1. Note: if you joined a pre-existing collaborative that already has a volunteer list(s), you can skip this step.
	6. Having created a volunteer list, you're ready to create your first event!
		1. How to create an event
		2. How to invite volunteers to sign up for an event
	7. **In the future, after you have already used Volunteer.Legal to organize an immigration workshop and you are ready to learn about some of its advanced features, you can read the Advanced Users Guide.**