Over the course of the past several months, a broad workgroup of staff has been working, with the support and feedback of Volunteer Advisory Groups, to review and clean-up existing volunteer affiliations.

A primary goal of this initiative is to ensure that accurate information about volunteers is maintained in our Global Link database. Going forward, accurate information about volunteers’ activities within their area teams/chapters will allow more targeted communication by staff to volunteers about potential opportunities, projects and tasks.

For those who are perhaps less familiar with volunteer affiliations, an affiliation is defined as a “tag” within the Global Link database that can be applied to a volunteer’s person record to identify them as being involved in particular types of volunteer functions (e.g., Hosting Volunteer) and, in addition, grant certain permissions to operate within the database that are associated with functions/tasks.

The result of this initiative has been:

1. Identification of opportunities to refine/consolidate volunteer affiliations by identifying unused affiliations
   • Moving forward, the list of consolidated task-related volunteer roles/affiliations will be listed in MyAFS HERE
     • Special care has been taken to ensure access/authorization associated with these affiliations are re-associated with the remaining/consolidated affiliations
   • Affiliations that have been retired are still retroactively visible in Global Link
     • If you wish to search for volunteers who had an affiliation that has been retired, GL will still allow this in the person record/search screen.
     • If you have concerns over an affiliation that has been removed because you feel you have lost access/authorizations in Global Link, please contact AskAFS@afsusa.org
2. Revision/Creation of Volunteer Affiliations Descriptions, in collaboration with Advisory Group volunteer members
   • Volunteer Roles/Affiliations/Position Descriptions have been updated and uploaded to MyAFS Help & Learning HERE for reference by volunteers
     • Please Note: work on some of these descriptions continues to be finalized as existing descriptions are revised to match new processes/realities (including those related to COVID-19)
3. Recognition of the need for improved management of assignment/activation/de-activation of volunteer affiliations in order to ensure data integrity moving forward
   • As of now, we have not changed any authority to assign affiliations (The list of volunteer positions with access to assign affiliations is listed HERE on Help & Learning)
     • If your team wishes to update volunteer affiliations for your volunteers, instructions can also be found at the same link
   • Currently, we are evaluating the best process to maintain accuracy in the affiliation management process.

The above results/actions are a strong platform to build upon in supporting cross-organizational collaboration and communication – and we’re thankful for the strong support provided by the Volunteer Advisory Groups in improving AFS-USA operations as we look toward the future!