The Volunteer Onboarding Wizard

The onboarding wizard is a short profile-capture step that new volunteers see the first time they log in to their volunteer portal. It collects interests, skills, availability, and communication preferences so your organization can better match and reach volunteers — without any extra data entry work for admins.

Enabling and configuring the wizard

Go to Volunteer Management → Settings tab.
Open the Onboarding Wizard card.
Turn on Enable Onboarding Wizard.
Choose which steps to include using the step checkboxes: Interests, Skills, Availability, and Communication Preferences. Any step left unchecked is skipped for every volunteer.
Enter optional welcome text shown on the first screen of the wizard. Leave it blank to skip the welcome screen entirely.
Build your Interest and Skill vocabularies using the chip editors — these are the options volunteers can pick from. Add or remove chips to match how your organization categorizes volunteer work.

The volunteer's experience

The wizard opens automatically as a modal the first time a volunteer logs into their portal, as long as they've signed up for at least one shift on a volunteer signup campaign. It walks through the enabled steps in order:

Welcome — your custom welcome text, if set.
Interests — the volunteer picks from your Interest chip vocabulary.
Skills — the volunteer picks from your Skill chip vocabulary.
Availability — a grid of days (Monday–Sunday) by time of day (Morning/Afternoon/Evening) where the volunteer toggles the slots they're generally free. They can also add blackout date ranges (using the standard date pickers) for periods they know they won't be available, such as an upcoming vacation.
Communication Preferences — the volunteer's email subscription settings.

A volunteer can also skip the wizard with Skip for now. If they do, the wizard won't reappear for 14 days, after which it will prompt them again on their next portal visit (unless they've completed it in the meantime). Once a volunteer finishes the wizard, it won't be shown to them again automatically — but they can reopen it any time using the Edit button on the My volunteer profile card in their portal.

Where the data goes

Understanding where this data lives helps explain how it shows up elsewhere in BetterUnite:

Wizard step	Stored as
Interests	Tags on the contact record, prefixed vint: (e.g. vint:animal-care)
Skills	Tags on the contact record, prefixed vskill: (e.g. vskill:first-aid)
Availability	JSON on the volunteer profile — a list of available slots (e.g. mon_am, sat_eve) plus any blackout date ranges

Because interests and skills are stored as ordinary contact tags rather than in a separate volunteer-only table, they're automatically available in Advanced Filters and any other place you segment contacts by tag — no special setup required.

Viewing a volunteer's captured profile

Admins can see a read-only view of everything a volunteer entered in the wizard — interests, skills, availability grid, and blackout dates — directly from the volunteer's record in Volunteer Management. This is useful for scheduling and for confirming a volunteer's self-reported availability before assigning them to shifts.