Configuring Assemble
Introduction
Assemble is a powerful volunteer management system that gives organisations lots of flexibility and control over how their users interact with it. We understand that it can be a challenge to decide where to start as there is so much to configure.
This article is designed to help by introducing key concepts of what dependencies within Assemble apply, terms used for functions and the best order to configure to build your understanding of Assemble and its flexibility in a structured way.
Using this article
The article has been designed to remain open as you configure. Linking to other areas of the administration guide to provide detail on the various steps. Each link opens in a new tab to allow you to quickly to return to this article.
Within Assemble we use a number of terms to relate to specific functions which may seem confusing as a new user but will quickly become clear. To help with this through the guide you will find these terms have a pop-up help text, simply hover over the term to see a short definition.
Clean system first login
Before you configure anything within Assemble, you will have a base configuration of one user, two roles and two teams configured by Assemble Professional Services. Before building more, it is helpful to understand dependencies and what these terms mean.
Assemble elements all need to link together to work, and therefore you need to have a structure to build into. To exist in Assemble a user must have a role, a team and a manager. Equally a role must be linked to a permission group, so if you want to add more roles you need the permission groups first.
This means you need to build the platform up in layers, starting with the defaults supplied for your high-level users and working down to more granular detail. At this early stage, it would be best to work with a simple ‘role’ and limited area of your organisation while you get used to the platform.
The first additional user you add will be more complex than any that follow, this should be the organisation head to whom everyone else will ultimately report within the Assemble environment. This is often the Head of Volunteering or equivalent for your organisation.
Contact us
Assemble staff are always on hand to provide assistance during this crucial stage of your journey with us. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.
The first thing to do is to make Assemble a bit more "yours". Within the Organisation Settings page, you can enter links to your organisation's social media feeds along with other localisation changes to the system like date/time formats.
You can also change the styling of the automated emails sent from Assemble.
To Access Assemble settings click on your initials on the top right and select ‘settings’ from the menu.
Image - setting menu
Permissions define what you can do in detail, they are grouped logically into permission groups which are in turn assigned to roles. You need to decide what your users will have access to and define a permission group for them if the default options don't suit your organisation.
By default, Assemble will come pre-loaded with three permission groups, volunteer, manager and administrator. You can use these as the building blocks for your organisation and can even use them as they are. The specific permissions granted to permission groups can be edited and amended whenever you want so you can finalise which permissions are turned on in each group later. At this early stage, you need to have the permission groups set up so the three out-of-the-box groups of administrator, manager and volunteer may well be enough.
You can find out more about configuring permission groups here.
Role profiles are at the heart of users' records in 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 active role assigned to their account.
By default, Assemble will come pre-loaded with two role profiles, Volunteer and Admin. You can use these as the building blocks for your organisation.
You can find out more about configuring role profiles here.
Assemble supports unlimited level and numbers of hierarchy locations referred to as teams. Teams allow you to configure Assemble to reflect the volunteering structure of your organisation, how volunteers work together and how you manage volunteering.
In addition to roles, each user must be placed in a team within your organisation. This will determine who can manage them and if they are a supervisor, who they can manage.
By default, Assemble will have two levels of teams already configured with the top team inheriting the name of your organisation. Below that, you will find a team called "Volunteers".
NB Your administrators (and normally the volunteering team) should always be at the top of your team structure in Assemble.
You can find out more about configuring permission groups here.
Once you have configured the above settings, you can start adding custom fields (attributes) to your system.
Custom fields allow you to store details against your users which managers or volunteers themselves can complete or update.
You can find out more about configuring custom fields here.
Assemble allows organisations to add skills and/or interest so that your users can update their profile.
You can use these skills/interests to search/filter your users, allowing you to better engage them.
You can find out more about configuring skills & interests here.
Next steps
Congratulations, you should now be well on the way to getting Assemble built up for your organisation. You can now start looking into building down through the team structure, adding more roles and getting Assemble configured exactly how you need to support your volunteers.
If you are an Assemble enterprise customer don’t forget your deployment includes training and consultancy to help you get the most from the platform.