Build a Kiosk That Shows Only One Team or Event

You run the Saturday food pantry with 22 volunteers. Your roster has 240 people in it, because you also run the after-school program, the winter coat drive, and the Tuesday delivery route. When a pantry volunteer walks up to the tablet, they should see 22 names, not 240. Scrolling past strangers to find yourself is how people give up and skip the clock-in entirely.

A filtered kiosk fixes that. It is a kiosk that shows only the people in one group, so the tablet at the pantry door lists the pantry crew and nobody else. Here is how to build one from an empty workspace, in the order you actually do it.

Decide what the filter is: a team, a program, or a one-off event

Before you touch anything, pick the single thing this kiosk represents. Not "the pantry and also sometimes the delivery route." One kiosk, one group. Common choices:

• A standing team that works the same shift every week (Saturday pantry crew).
• A program that runs for a season (the winter coat drive, September through December).
• A one-off event with a fixed guest list (the annual fundraiser gala on the 14th).

If a person belongs to two of these, that is fine. They can appear on two filtered kiosks. What matters is that each kiosk maps to exactly one group so the name list stays short.

Create the worker group and assign people to it

In Kangaroo Clock, worker groups label people, and tags label time entries. For a filtered kiosk you want a worker group, because you are filtering who shows up, not what kind of hours they log.

If you have not added anyone yet, start there. Get your people into the workspace first, then group them. Workers never make accounts and never sign in, so adding someone is just a name; the common setup questions cover the details if you get stuck.

Steps:

1. Open the admin dashboard and go to your list of people.
2. Create a worker group and name it exactly what the kiosk is for. Use a name a tired volunteer would recognize on a screen: "Saturday Pantry," not "Grp_A_2024."
3. Assign each person who works this team or event to the group. Someone can be in more than one group without any conflict.

Get the membership right now. The kiosk shows whoever is in the group at the moment it loads, so if you add a new volunteer next week, add them to the group and they appear automatically.

Generate the filtered kiosk link and lock it to the group

Now build the actual screen. A filtered kiosk is a regular kiosk URL scoped to one worker group. Open the kiosk settings, choose the group you just made, and generate the link. The full walkthrough for making a kiosk for one team or event shows exactly where that setting lives in the dashboard.

Two things to check before you walk away:

• Load the link and confirm you see only the group's names. If you see the whole roster, the filter did not apply and you are on the general kiosk URL.
• Bookmark the filtered URL on the tablet itself, or set it as the browser home page, so a reboot lands back on the right screen instead of a blank tab.

If you would rather not run a tablet at all, generate a QR sign-in poster for the table pointed at the same filtered link. People scan it with their own phones and see the same short list. No tablet to charge, nothing to steal.

Set up the tablet at the door

Physical setup takes five minutes and saves you a dozen questions on the day.

1. Open the filtered link in the tablet browser and go full screen.
2. Turn off auto-lock, or set the screen timeout to its longest setting, so the tablet does not sleep between arrivals.
3. Prop it where the line naturally passes. People clock in when the device is on the path they already walk.
4. Do a test tap yourself. Tap your name, confirm you are on the clock, then clock out so the record is clean.

Workers tap their name to clock in, and the dashboard shows who is currently on the clock in real time. When they leave, they tap again to clock out.

Handle the volunteer who forgets to clock out

Someone will leave the gala without tapping out. Count on it. Kangaroo Clock's auto-close for forgotten clock-outs handles this by closing a stale open entry at its start time plus a cutoff you set, never at the current time. A volunteer who forgot to tap out at 3 PM does not end up credited until midnight. This keeps your reported hours honest without you chasing anyone down.

Pull hours for just that team or event

After the event, you want the pantry hours, not everything. Filter your report by the worker group and export. The CSV keeps a stable column layout every time, including a distinct-worker count, so a grant report or a payroll handoff looks the same month after month. If you need the totals in decimal for a spreadsheet, run the numbers through the decimal and HH:MM converter before you send them along.

When to add a second filtered kiosk

Add another filtered kiosk the moment a second team is standing in the same line and having to scroll past your first team's names. One kiosk per group is cheap to set up and there is no per-seat cost to worry about, so build one for the coat drive, one for the pantry, and one for the gala. Each shows its own short list. Each reports on its own.

Start with the group that has the messiest sign-in today, build its filtered kiosk this week, and add the rest as they come up.