Background

The spec for this item has changed quite a bit as we've had more conversations about the scenario and best volunteer management practices.

Original Use Case

In some cases, it is not possible to collect the contact information for each volunteer. Sometimes a volunteer brings coworkers, her church group, or friends. These contacts are unlikely to have contact with the organization again, but the organization may still need to report on their participation (e.g., grant funds are often tied up in reporting the number of volunteers, the number of volunteer hours, etc.).

Updated Use Case

Additional discussion resulted in the following determinations:

• Capturing some amount of information about people who volunteer with an organization is essential. These folks are potential future volunteers, donors, advocates; allowing the primary volunteer to control that relationship is unacceptable. Allowing folks to pass through an organization's volunteer program without knowing who they are or having a way to contact them in the future is an operational failure that the software should not encourage. The originally discussed approach of multiplying the primary volunteer's efforts is wrongheaded.
• Volunteer wranglers, if you will, are much more likely to provide information about the additional volunteers if it's easy. The new approach is to provide the option of using a simplified fieldset for the additional volunteers via an additional profile.
• Not all volunteer opportunities are candidates for the easy plus-one approach to registration. Some vol opps require screening or special skills. Volunteer coordinators should have a way to disable this feature. Proposed solution: default the "additional volunteers" profile to NULL; if not populated, the additional profile doesn't display, and the feature is disabled.
• CiviVolunteer already supports unexpected volunteers. If someone shows up without signing up, their time can be logged via the Log Hours UI, which allows ad hoc additions.

Technical Approach

• Update the Project UI. Add a second profile selector for the "additional volunteers." These will be distinguished from the other profiles associated with the project via uf_join:module_data.
• Update the volunteer signup page to include flagged profiles. Add some JavaScript to allow addition of an unlimited number of rows.

Stray Thoughts

• I think this feature should be biased toward having a simplified fieldset for the additional volunteers (e.g., first, last, email or phone), though obviously the approach of using a profile allows volunteer coordinators to define the field spec. How about we display the additional volunteers fields in a table? For example: