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 or seven days have passed.

Steps

1. Open your dashboard and choose Log experience.
2. Choose External Experience.
3. Under Referee Information, fill in Referee organization, 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.
4. 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.
5. Under Experience Details, add an Experience title, the Experience date, the Experience hours and the Experience details.
6. 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.

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. Check the address you typed. Ask them to look in their spam folder. If the address was wrong, wait for the record to show Expired after seven days, then submit it again.
• You made a mistake in the details. Ask your referee not to confirm it. After seven days it expires, and you can submit a corrected record.
• 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.