Shifts for Events

ControlShift Team on August 26, 2020

As electoral organizing ramps up before election day in the United States, we’re excited to roll out support for event shifts as part of ContolShift’s member-led events feature.

Shifts are a powerful way for organizers to collect signups for events that are a bit more complicated than the average house party. In our implementation, they stay out of the way for most events, but are there when you need them to organize your attendees for events like:

• Parties where the organizer might ask people to help out via setup or cleanup shifts before and after the main event.
• A canvass where the organizer intends several waves of attendees throughout the day.
• Phone banks over the course of several days to allow people to drop in whenever they have time.
• Tabling at a farmer’s market or other event.
• Staffing a help line so there is always someone ready to answer questions from other volunteers. Those are just some examples, and we’re looking forward to seeing all of the ways that you use event shifts in your organizing!

After creating an event, it’s easy to create time slots for shifts within the event.

It’s quick and easy for hosts (and admins) to add shifts to an event.

Shifts are displayed on the event form so supporters can sign up for shifts when they RSVP.

Attendees can choose shifts from the RSVP form.

Event hosts can easily manage their shift signups, checking people into the event as they arrive.

Hosts see attendee information for each shift.

We also support multi-day events, so you can schedule a week of volunteer shifts and then allow your attendees to sign up for as many time slots as they are able to attend without needing to duplicate events for each day.

If the CRM your platform is integrated with supports shifts, we’ll sync shifts along with other event data to that toolset. This is particularly powerful for organizations using NGPVAN’s field tools alongside ControlShift for distributed member-led events. As soon as signups are created, we’ll publish those attendees and the shifts the supporters chose to the event record in NGPVAN.

This is one of many innovations we are planning to make organizers and volunteers more efficient as we approach election day in the US.