Notify volunteers when their shift is cancelled

Just had another instance of this situation confusing a volunteer. We cancelled a shift on the 26th because the food bank is closed, and she thought it was in response to an unrelated email she sent regarding an upcoming absence. Thanks!

Thanks, Annette! I appreciate it, this continues to be a time-suck for us. The holidays this year are busier than ever before at the food bank, so our schedule has been a bit less predictable than it has in years past and we've had to send a number of cancellations. I've attached an email we got from a volunteer who didn't see the "Heads up" email that our staff composed to warn her that her shift had been cancelled and was upset when she received the automatic removal notification. I think she overreacted a bit, but this is the general gist of the messages we receive from folks when we have to cancel a shift. The time to compose and copy/paste email addresses out of Galaxy into Outlook, and the hand-holding when folks respond like this to the notification is not insignificant and we don't like burning bridges with volunteers who are put out by the miscommunication, (even when it's their own fault for not reading all the emails.) 

Another thought I had about a possible remedy for this issue would be to allow filtering by shift date/time within a specific opportunity response in the email blast feature. 

If I could select only volunteers who responded to the 12pm Produce Packing Shift on November 15th, for example, I could email all of them directly before canceling the shift and turn off the auto-notification. I know there is a way to do this through the responses or opportunities sections, but it would be awesome if we could do it via email blast so we could save a cancellation message to recycle instead of having to compose a new one each time. 

Thanks again!

Circling back as we're now about a year into using our site. This feature is still something that would be really useful for our team, as we often have to adjust the schedule based on unexpected events and volunteers regularly get confused about why they have been removed. We usually try to send them another email via the opportunity before deleting the shift to warn them that we're canceling, but this feels redundant when the possibility for a separate notification exists. 

Thanks!

Hi Grace,

I hope you’re doing well, and thank you for this post! I have added “an automated notification that gets sent out whenever a Program Manager deletes a shift” to our list of product suggestions, and will make sure to discuss this with the rest of the team.

Have a great day!

Cirũ Franklin

Galaxy Digital Customer Experience

Data Specialist

Pronouns: She, her, hers

Hi Ali, 

Not sure if this ever got any more traction, but I'm in my first week of our site going live and already wishing I had this notification at my disposal. Our schedule is in a somewhat constant state of flux, so it would be awesome to have a notification like this available if I need to cancel a shift last minute. 

Thanks!

-Grace

Hi Ali,

We have modified the wording of the Unregistration Notification in a way that spells out the two different types of events that could trigger the sending of it.  Either the volunteer has unregistered their self from a shift, or the Program Manager has deleted a shift due to unforeseen circumstances.  These two events are very different from the volunteers perspective, and rather than sending a description of both events, it would be more user friendly to send messages specific to the event that triggered the notification.  With this product suggestion, the Unregistration Notification sent to the volunteer would remain unchanged.  The new notification would be specifically for the case where the Product Manager deletes a shift.