Volunteer data is personal data, and coordinators get asked about it: what is stored, how to hand someone their data or erase it, and what happens to it when the plugin is removed or the site moves. This page answers each, plainly.
What VolunteerPress stores
- Volunteer records — name, email, phone, status, your private admin notes, and whether they have unsubscribed from composed emails.
- Signups — who signed up for which shift, when, their status, and their answers to any custom signup questions.
- Shifts — dates, times, capacity, roles, locations.
- An email log — the subject and date of each email sent to each volunteer. Message bodies are not kept.
Opportunities are ordinary WordPress content, like pages. Everything else above lives in the plugin’s own database tables — which matters when you move a site; see below.
Giving a volunteer their data, or erasing it
VolunteerPress plugs into WordPress’s built-in personal-data tools, so one request covers the whole site:
- Tools → Export Personal Data, with the volunteer’s email address, produces a downloadable file including their volunteer profile, every signup with its form answers, and their email history.
- Tools → Erase Personal Data removes what identifies them: upcoming signups are cancelled (freeing their spots for the waitlist) and deleted, custom-form answers are deleted, and past signups are kept only in de-identified form so your attendance counts stay honest — the name, email, and phone on them are replaced with anonymous placeholders.
For everyday spreadsheet needs, the VolunteerPress Dashboard’s Export volunteers and Export signups buttons download CSV files of the full lists.
Uninstalling keeps your data
Deleting the plugin does not delete your volunteer data. Deactivating never removes anything, and uninstalling leaves every table in place unless you have told it otherwise: VolunteerPress → Settings → Data on uninstall has a checkbox, “Keep all VolunteerPress data when the plugin is deleted”, which is on by default. Reinstall the plugin later and your opportunities, shifts, signups, and volunteers are exactly where you left them. Uncheck that box only when you are leaving for good and want the tables removed on delete.
Moving your site: use a database backup, not the WordPress exporter
WordPress’s built-in export (Tools → Export) carries pages, posts, and other ordinary content — including your opportunities. It does not carry shifts, signups, or volunteers, because they live in the plugin’s own tables. A site rebuilt from that export file arrives with opportunities that have no shifts and no signup history, which looks like data loss and is easy to miss until volunteers notice.
To move or back up a VolunteerPress site, take the whole database instead: your host’s migration or backup tool, a migration plugin that copies the full database, or a database export made by your host’s control panel all carry everything. If you can restore the site and see your signups under VolunteerPress → Shift signups, the move carried your data.