Setting Up a Volunteer Program | Volunteers | Crafted Call
Setting Up a Volunteer Program
Gallery OwnersUpdated Sep 21, 2026
Everything for volunteers lives under Admin → Volunteers. This article covers the decisions you make once: how people join your program, what an opportunity looks like, how a weekly commitment repeats, and whether volunteers sign a waiver. Filling the calendar and running the day itself are covered in Shifts, Scheduling and Hours.
Availability: Volunteer management is included from the Starter plan up. See Plans and Pricing.
Decide how people join
Open Admin → Volunteers → Settings and pick a Volunteer Access Mode:
Invite Only is the default. Only people you invite become volunteers.
Application Review lets people apply, and you approve or reject each one from Applications.
Open Self-Registration lets anyone with an account sign up and appear in your roster.
With open registration, someone can also take a shift straight from your public opportunity page without an account at all. They enter their Full name and email, choose a role, and use Email me a confirmation link. Clicking the link in their inbox confirms the shift. That is the shortest path from a poster or a social post to a filled slot.
Invitations go out from Admin → Volunteers → Invitations, and applications waiting on you appear under Applications.
Create an opportunity
An opportunity is one piece of work at one time, with the roles it needs. Go to Admin → Volunteers → Opportunities and choose to create one.
Give it a Title and a Description. Say what the person will actually do, not just that you need help.
Set the start and end times. If you have published open hours, a strip above the time fields offers them as Open hours without volunteer coverage. Click one to prefill the times, so you staff the hours you are actually open.
Under Volunteer Roles, use Add new role for each distinct job and set Slots for how many people that role needs. A Saturday might be four Gallery Attendant slots and one Setup Crew slot.
Save. Publish it when you are ready for volunteers to see it.
Each role is what a volunteer signs up for, so name roles the way you would describe them to someone standing in front of you.
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Repeating opportunities
A weekly gallery sit does not need creating fifty times. When you create an opportunity, tick Repeats.
Frequency is Weekly, Daily or Monthly, with an interval such as Every 2 weeks.
Repeat on picks the weekdays. Leave all of them off to repeat on the start date's own weekday.
Under Ends, choose On date and pick an end date, or choose After and enter how many times it should run.
Crafted Call creates a real opportunity for each date, so every date can be staffed, edited and cancelled on its own.
A default person per role
While you are setting up a repeating opportunity, each role gets a Default assignee picker. Choose the volunteer who normally does that job and they are assigned to every generated date. Volunteers whose saved weekly availability fits the time are marked in the list, so you can see at a glance who actually fits. Leave it on No default to fill each date by hand.
If a default person could not be scheduled on some dates, for example because they were already booked, the series page says how many dates were left open and marks them.
Changing one date, or all of them
Open the series to see every date it generated. Edit a single date and it is stamped as Edited, which means later changes to the whole series skip it and leave your one-off alone. A date where somebody else is covering shows Override.
From the series you can Extend series to add more dates, Edit series to change future dates, or Cancel series. Editing the series applies to future dates that have not been individually edited, and the cadence itself cannot be changed after the fact. If you need a different rhythm, cancel and create a new series.
Duplicating an opportunity
Any opportunity has a Duplicate action. It copies the basic details and the roles into a fresh draft, without assignments or series linkage. Use it for the annual gala that is nearly the same every year.
Liability waivers
If your organization asks volunteers to sign a waiver, publish it in Admin → Volunteers → Settings under Volunteer Waiver.
Paste your waiver into Waiver text and choose Publish waiver. Publishing snapshots that exact text as a version. Publishing again creates the next version, and previously signed versions stay on record.
Turn on Require a signed waiver.
With that on, a volunteer must sign the current version before they can sign up for, confirm, or check in to a shift. They sign from their own volunteering settings by typing their full name and ticking the agreement, and a parent or guardian can sign for a minor.
Your roster then carries a Waiver column reading Signed v3 for someone on the current version, or Required for someone who still needs to sign. Because signatures are recorded against a version, publishing new wording tells you exactly who has agreed to the wording that is now in force.
Roles for call dropoff and pickup
When a call has artwork dropoff and pickup windows, Crafted Call creates volunteer opportunities for those windows automatically. Under Call staffing roles in your volunteer settings, define the crew those windows should ask for. Add up to ten roles with their slot counts and choose Save roles. Without any configuration you get a single Gallery Attendant.
Deleting one of those automatically created opportunities only removes it until the call is saved again. To remove it for good, edit the windows on the call itself.
Your public opportunity page
Your organization has a public volunteer page at /org/<your-slug>/volunteers, headed Volunteer Opportunities. It lists everything you have published, and it is the link to put on your website, in a newsletter, or on a poster. From the volunteer dashboard, View public page opens it as a visitor sees it.
Email response buttons
By default, the emails Crafted Call sends about a shift carry Yes, I'll be there and Can't make it buttons, so a volunteer can answer without signing in. If that does not suit your program, turn off Email response buttons under Admin → Volunteers → Settings. How those responses behave, including the cancellation window, is covered in Shifts, Scheduling and Hours.
Cancelling an opportunity
Deleting an opportunity cancels it rather than erasing it: it stays visible under the Cancelled filter, and anyone assigned has their assignment cancelled and is notified. The dialog tells you how many volunteers that affects before you confirm.
Troubleshooting
I do not see a Volunteers section.
Volunteer management is included from the Starter plan up, and it needs the volunteer administrator role. Check both.
Nobody can sign up on my public page.
The opportunity has to be published, and your access mode has to allow it. Invite Only means people must be invited first.
A volunteer cannot confirm their shift.
If you require a waiver, they must sign the current version first. Their roster row will say Required.
The same opportunity keeps reappearing after I delete it.
It is generated from a call's dropoff or pickup window. Edit the windows on the call.
