Allow agencies to manage who can sign up for restricted needs.

We have a number of agencies that want to be able to restrict need visibility to volunteers who qualify (have completed requisite training, have clearances, etc.).

Currently there are three different ways to APPROXIMATE this, but all have problems and either present volunteers or agency managers a sub optimal experience.

What we would like to see is for agency managers to create and manager their own user groups. A common group appears to be "vetted volunteers." Then these people would be able to see and respond to private needs that are open to their user group. The critical aspect of this is proving user group control to agency managers AND not exposing these lists to other agencies.

The three mechanisms that currently exist, and why each is sub-optimal, are as follows:

1: Managers can manually assign volunteers to a private needs [The problem is that this requires communications OUTSIDE of Get Connected and violates one of the key benefits of the solution -- it works, but ...]

2. Managers can create private needs and share the link with specific volunteers. [The problem is that users can share the link with others -- which leads to the need for ongoing review of responses and possible removal/deletion of responses]

BOTH of the first two also have a visibility issue for volunteers. That is, they can neither see the need in any place EXCEPT their responses (not in calendar, not in needs list) EVEN for needs to which they have responded or been assigned. If they have turned off Email responses, this becomes even more problematic and requires extra diligence and/or communication outside of the portal.

3. Limit visibility of private needs using a user group. [The problems with this are that ONLY site managers can create user groups and that while the link for User groups appears on the Agency Managers Need definition, they cannot always see or assign user groups (problem noted, but can't consistently cause it to occur). Nor can agency managers create user groups. However, an agency manager who has been added as a "leader" to a user group CAN edit and manager user groups. Use of user groups DOES lead to the desired visibility for "appropriate" people, but user groups are site specific - so even one group per agency can lead to a cumbersome number of user groups to sort through when assigning groups to needs. While naming conventions may mitigate somewhat -- it seems messy and puts unnecessary onus on site managers to be responsive for something that really only needs to be in the purview of the agency managers]

For clarity, the desired option would be to allow agency managers to create their own user groups (probably via an add button on "my user groups") which would only be visible for needs of that agency. Site wide user groups, if they exist, would also be available for assignment to needs. Ideally, all agency managers would be included as leaders in private user groups and, but at a minimum the creating agency manager would automatically be added to private user groups and would be flagged as a leader.

Implementation suggestion: rename existing table and add a foreign key for the owner id (agency id -- site wide could be null or 0 ... alternately, and for better clarity, a separate flag could identify group type (agency/site)). Also add a view that looks the same (same 'table' name, columns, ...) as the current table but filters for only site wide user groups. This would make all current uses continue to function. Then the agency needs page would need to be modified to use a view or query that limited the user groups to the agency user groups and all site wide user groups.

0 Votes