Occasionally there may be a situation where a specific program requires a more frequent background check than your overall organization policy. Within VolunteerMatters a background check credential can only have 1 expiration policy. For example your organization's background check expiration policy may be 24 months. Meaning that after they run their background check, it is good for 2 years and will not expire in VolunteerMatters until that time at which they would be prompted to re-run if required. Then you have a program that requires an annual background check for volunteers. What do you do in this situation?
NOTE: Through our work with many volunteer organizations we have come to recommend performing annual background checks for all volunteers who require background checks. This has become the standard practice with the vast majority of organizations with which we work - also the practice recommended by all major insurers.
With that being said and using our example, if you maintain a policy where some volunteers have to be checked every 12 months and everyone else has to be checked every 24 months we have two recommendations.
1) You could have two background check credentials in VolunteerMatters - one that expires every 12 months (Used for those exception volunteers) and a second that expires every 24 months (used for all other volunteers). This can be either a manual background check or integrated check but you may need to contact your background check provider to see if they can support this type of integration. Two credentials in VolunteerMatters can not point to the same integration at a background check provider but we can have two separate credentials in VolunteerMatters point to two separate background check integrations at the same background check provider.
2) They could have as single background check credential that expires by rule after 24 months (the standard). However, the person responsible for the exception program could manually verify that the background check for that individual was run less than 12-mos ago and if not manually set that assignees standard credential to expired. Then they would notify the assigned volunteer to log into the volunteer portal where they will be immediately prompted to re-run their background check.
The down side to #1 is that if a volunteer has a 12-mo background check run less than 12 months ago and they sign-up for a different volunteer opportunity that requires the 24 month check, they are going to be prompted as-if they hadn't had a background check. Therefore, we might recommend a policy where your staff manually exempts volunteers who have one type of check from the other on a case by case basis.
The down side to the #2 solution is that it relies on staff to properly audit assignees to assure their background checks are not more than 12 months old. But that is a simple training task.
If we did not change our overall organization background check expiration policy to 12 months, we would recommend going with Option #2, because it's one program with an exception to your normal policy.
Please run any changes past your HR Department/Legal team to make sure you are properly protecting your volunteers and organization. Closerware/VolunteerMatters simply makes recommendations but does not provide any specific legal advice and cannot offer you legal council.
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