You can see information about all of your projects, or create a new project, from your dashboard. From here, you can also edit your organization's profile, or add a new admin to your account, using the link next to your organization’s name.
Creating Projects
Use the green button to draft a new project. Our Project Wizard will walk you through all of the information we need to share your project with volunteer lawyers.
You can save drafts of multiple projects until you are ready to publish them.
Reviewing & Selecting Volunteers
All of your draft, current, and past projects appear on your dashboard. Click on any project to see detailed volunteer information, with new volunteers at the top.
You can pause volunteer recruitment at any time directly from the project page. When you’re ready to connect with more volunteers, re-open your project to new volunteers using the same feature.
After reviewing volunteer information, you can message volunteers to explore working together or politely decline their help with the click of a button. After messaging a volunteer, you will have the opportunity to select them.
If you do not wish to screen your volunteers before accepting them into the project, you can turn on auto approval. If your project uses groups, you can do this in the Advanced Settings tab. If it doesn’t use groups, email wta-partnerships@civicnation.org to access this feature.
You can also use the Advanced Settings tab to create or edit your default messages to interested volunteers, as well as the messages you send when selecting or declining volunteers.
Organizing Your Volunteers
Filters
If you have many volunteers, our filters can help you narrow your pool based on location, legal expertise, language, their status on your project, and more. You can message the lawyers in your filtered list directly from the dashboard
Customized Questions to Volunteers
You can create up to two customized multiple choice questions to gather volunteer information relevant to your project. Common questions include whether a volunteer has prior experience with a specific task/filing/proceeding, whether a volunteer is interested in a project leadership role, or how far a volunteer is willing to travel. If you use these questions, you will also be able to filter volunteers by their responses to them.
Groups or Teams
You can also use groups to let your volunteers self-organize in ways that makes sense for your project, like:
Shifts for a hotline or clinic
Teams working on different research questions
Volunteers focused on certain states or cities
Lawyers with different backgrounds/expertise or skills
Volunteers who speak relevant languages
Lawyers who gave certain answers to your customized questions
When new volunteers join the project, they will be prompted to join relevant groups. You can edit the groups by adding or removing individual volunteers, and you can use the filters above to send messages only to group members.