Add volunteering you did somewhere else

Before you start

A Vinspired account, signed in.
Your referee’s full name and email address. A referee is somebody from the place you volunteered who saw you do it. If you have lost touch with the organisation, the Vinspired team can be your referee instead.
Their permission to give us their name and email. You confirm this when you submit.
One record at a time. You cannot submit another until your referee has answered, the record has expired after seven days, or you withdraw it.

Steps

Open your dashboard and choose Log experience.
Choose External Experience.
Under Referee Information, fill in Referee organisation, Referee email and Referee’s full name. No longer in touch with the organisation? Press Use Vinspired as my referee to fill in all three.
Write a short Referee message. It goes in the email to them, so remind them who you are and what you did. If Vinspired is your referee, say where you volunteered and how we can check it.
Under Experience Details, add an Experience title, the Experience date, the Experience hours and the Experience details.
Tick the box to confirm you have your referee’s permission, then press Submit for Verification.

What happens next

Your referee gets an email with your message and a button to confirm. When they press it, you get an email saying your hours have been verified, and the record shows as Verified in your External Experiences list. Until then it says Awaiting referee, with a line saying how many days your referee has left to respond.

If your referee says the details are not correct, you get an email saying so, with their reason if they gave one, and the record shows as Rejected. Press Try again on it to fix the referee details and send it again.

Verified hours count towards your total and your certificates, the same as hours an organisation approves.

Common problems

Your referee has not had the email. Ask them to look in their spam folder. A day after the last email you can press Send a reminder on the record, which sends them a fresh link and another seven days. You can send three emails to the same referee.
The referee’s email address was wrong, or they have left. A day after the last email, press Change referee on the record and enter someone else. Their old link stops working. You can change the referee three times.
You made a mistake in the details. Press Withdraw on the record, then submit a corrected one.
Your referee cannot confirm it. If nobody at the organisation can, press Use Vinspired as my referee and use your message to tell us where you volunteered and how we can check it, such as an event page, a news story or somebody else who was there. If we cannot check it, the record expires on its own.

Still stuck

Send us what you saw on screen through the contact form. We reply by email within two working days.