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Q&A Help Clinic

Expert Volunteer Guide

How the CSO Support Clinic works for Expert Volunteers: applying, your portal, how requests reach you, and handling a support request.

Thank you for volunteering your expertise. The CSO Support Clinic is a community space where civil society organisations (CSOs) across Trinidad and Tobago ask practical questions and, when they need more, request private one-to-one guidance from an Expert Volunteer like you. This guide explains what happens from the moment you apply to the moment you close a support request.

1. Applying and approval

  1. Apply at csogo.org/clinic/experts/register. Tick every topic you are comfortable advising on. You can pick more than one.
  2. The CSO Go team reviews your application. Until it is approved nothing else happens, and you will see a “pending approval” message after you submit.
  3. Once approved you receive a welcome email from csogo.org with your login details. If you did not set a password on the form, use the “Lost password” link on the login page.

2. Logging in and your Volunteer Portal

Log in at csogo.org/clinic/login. Your Volunteer Portal lives at csogo.org/clinic/portal and is only visible to approved Expert Volunteers. Bookmark it. This is where support requests assigned to you appear, where you reply, and where you close requests when they are resolved.

3. How a support request reaches you

  • A CSO representative logs in and submits a request at csogo.org/clinic/experts, choosing one topic area. Only topics that currently have at least one volunteer are offered.
  • The request is assigned automatically to the volunteer in that topic who currently has the fewest open requests. You may therefore receive a request without anyone contacting you first.
  • You get an email with the subject “Ticket Agent Change: request title #number”. The link in that email opens the request in your Volunteer Portal.
  • If nobody is available in a topic, the CSO Go team handles the request from the admin dashboard and may contact you directly.

4. Handling a request

  • Read the whole request first. It includes what they need help with, the outcome they hope for, any deadline, steps already taken, links, attachments, and how they prefer to be contacted (message in the platform, email, or a short call).
  • Reply in the portal. Your reply is emailed to the CSO representative, who answers from their own page at csogo.org/clinic/requests. Keeping the conversation in the platform keeps a record for both of you.
  • Use internal notes for anything you want the CSO Go team to see but not the requester, for example a referral suggestion or a reason you cannot help.
  • Aim to acknowledge within a few working days, even if the full answer takes longer. A short “I have seen this and will come back to you by …” makes a big difference.
  • Close the request when you have given your guidance. The requester receives a closing email and can reopen it if something is still unresolved.
  • If a request is outside your expertise, add an internal note and leave it open; the CSO Go team will re-assign it.

5. Community questions

Whenever someone posts a new question in one of your topics on the Clinic forum you receive an email titled “New question in topic: question title”. Answering in the forum is optional but valuable, because one good public answer helps every organisation with the same problem. Answers from Expert Volunteers are highlighted on the site.

6. Your profile and topics

Your public profile shows your name, role, organisation and topics of expertise. To change your topics, add or remove a topic on your profile page or email [email protected]. The current topic areas are:

  • Governance and board management
  • Strategic planning and organisational development
  • Finance, audit and accountability
  • Human resources and volunteer management
  • Project management and monitoring and evaluation
  • Funding, proposal writing and sustainability
  • Legal, NPO registration and regulatory compliance
  • AML/CFT compliance and banking
  • Communications, marketing and stakeholder engagement
  • Policies, safeguarding, ethics and data protection
  • Information technology and digital transformation

7. What we ask of you

  • Support is voluntary and best-effort. CSO Go facilitates the introduction; you decide how much time you can give. Around one to two hours a month is typical.
  • Treat everything shared in a request as confidential to that organisation.
  • Give practical guidance based on your experience. You are not expected to provide formal legal, audit or financial opinions, and you should say so where a professional engagement is needed.
  • If you need to step back for a while, tell the team at [email protected] so requests are not routed to you.

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