Per-Shift Waitlists and Auto-Fill

Waitlists let volunteers join a queue for a sold-out or fully-booked shift and get offered a spot automatically as one opens up. Each shift maintains its own waitlist queue, so a volunteer waitlisted for the Saturday morning shift won't be offered a spot on Saturday evening's shift instead.

Enabling waitlists on a campaign

Open the campaign's waitlist settings card.
Turn on Waitlist Enabled.
Choose a Waitlist Mode: Auto or Manual (see below).
Set the Offer Expiry in hours — how long a volunteer has to respond to an offered spot before it's passed to the next person in line.

Auto vs. Manual mode

Auto — as soon as a spot frees up on a shift (a cancellation, an expired offer, etc.), the next person in that shift's queue is automatically offered the spot.
Manual — spots that free up do not automatically generate an offer. An admin decides when to offer the open spot to the next person in line, from the waitlist dashboard.

How volunteers join the waitlist

When a ticket type or a specific shift is sold out, the public event/volunteer page shows it as available to join via waitlist. The volunteer enters their name, email, phone, and the quantity they want, and joins the queue for that specific shift (or, if the shift isn't specified, the job as a whole). To prevent duplicate entries, the system checks for an existing active entry (Waiting or Offered) for the same combination of campaign, ticket/shift type, and email before adding a new one.

How offers work

When a volunteer reaches the front of the queue and a spot is available:

The system generates a unique offer link (a token) and records when the offer was made and when it expires, based on your configured expiry window.
The freed-up quantity is temporarily reserved for that volunteer so it can't be taken by someone else while their offer is pending.
The volunteer receives an email (and/or SMS, if configured) with a link to complete their registration or purchase.

Conversion

When the volunteer clicks their offer link and completes registration, their waitlist entry is marked Converted and the reserved quantity is finalized as their registration — it's no longer just "reserved," it's booked.

What happens if an offer isn't used

If the volunteer doesn't respond within the expiry window, the offer expires: the reserved quantity is released, and — if the shift is in Auto mode — the next person in that shift's queue is automatically offered the spot. The same release-and-advance behavior happens if a volunteer explicitly cancels their pending offer.

The admin waitlist dashboard

The waitlist dashboard shows every waitlist entry across a campaign, labeled by which shift or session each entry belongs to, along with its status: Waiting, Offered, Converted, Expired, or Cancelled. In Manual mode, this is where admins trigger the next offer when a spot opens up.

Configuring expiry hours

The offer expiry window is set per campaign alongside the Enabled toggle and Mode setting. Shorter windows cycle through the waitlist faster when spots are scarce; longer windows give volunteers more time to respond but can leave a spot reserved-but-unconfirmed for longer.