Role profiles - introduction

Role profiles are at the heart of users on Assemble. They determine how users are recruited, what functionalities they have access to and what information is stored against them.

Any user in the system, regardless of whether or not they are a volunteer or a non-volunteer, must have at least one current, active role. Only users with a current, active role can log into Assemble - there's no "guest" access.

As can be seen in the above diagram, the role that a user has determines:

• Whether or not they are a volunteer or a non-volunteer
• Custom fields/attributes that are applied to their record
• Permissions assigned to them (via the permission group)
• Skills/interests that can be assigned
• Access to restricted documents in The Hub

A role profile will also be the building blocks for an opportunity to be published to recruit volunteers for your organisation. The role profile determines the

• Recruitment process to be followed
• Any non-standard application questions
• Any non-standard custom fields that are also included on the application form

When a role is assigned to a user either through recruitment or via direct assignment, they will have a start date and if fixed term, an end date. They will also be assigned to a team/hierarchy within your organisation that determines where they "sit" within the organisation for that role. Additionally, a user can have multiple roles, based in different teams.

As long as a user has one active role, they will be granted access to Assemble.

It is also possible for a user to leave the organisation and then resume their volunteering with the organisation by having a new role assigned to them. Their full role history is retained on Assemble as long as their data was not anonymised.

Volunteer vs non-volunteer role profile

Assemble differentiates between volunteers and non-volunteers through their role profile. Users with solely non-volunteer roles are not included in most reports and neither can the organisation set up opportunities (recruitment) for non-volunteer roles.

Role families

It is possible to group roles together using role families. They are used mostly for reporting purposes as it allows a manager to see reports on all similar roles without having the need to select them all individually. Role families also help you quickly find role profiles within multiple places in Assemble, including filters.

Draft/active/inactive role profiles

A role profile can have one of three states:

Draft

A draft role profile allows the organisation to take their time defining the role profile and only activating it when they are ready to start using it. It is also possible to give certain supervisors permissions to draft a new role profile but only specific administrators having the permission to approve it. Often it's the volunteering/volunteering development team that keeps the authority to approve role profiles. With multiple settings for Assemble being needed, this is a good way to work to make sure that there's consistency of checks, training etc.

Active

Once a role profile is approved, it becomes active and can be used to create opportunities or be assigned to users. Some details of role profiles, which would change the details of what a volunteer has agreed to, cannot be changed once any volunteer is assigned it. But you can change aspects like the training required for holders of the role, risk activities and settings for recruitment.

If you need to make slight alterations to a role profile, it is best to create a new one based on the existing one. You can use the internal name for version control, but remember to set the old version as Inactive when the new version is active so that new users are assigned the correct version.

Inactive

If you no longer want a role profile to be used to create a new opportunity or be assigned direct to users, mark it as inactive. This will not end the roles of any existing users or limit the recruitment process for existing opportunities. However, a new opportunity will no longer be able to be created from it and the role will not be available to be manually added to an exisiting user's record.