Volunteers are the backbone of many nonprofit organizations. They help with fundraising, events and administrative tasks, offer professional skills (to name a few) and most importantly they help spread awareness for the mission of your organization.

Why?

Any non-profit needs to manage its resource pool of volunteers. In addition, there can be different type of volunteers:

• Some who just want to volunteer with the time – giving back
• With expectation to enhance work experience so they can enter the job market/ improve job prospects
• Some combination the above two items

What all issues we need to address?

• Sign-up a new volunteer (possibly a web-to-lead form) – we need to identify them as separate category/record type for email and other communication
• Post jobs
• On-boarding the new volunteers – need to give them a package (can be a link to some resources that are on the website)
• Non-disclosure agreement to sign (will need to make use of DocuSign Process)
• Assign jobs and Track the hours
• Send thank-you notes to Volunteers who have done XX amounts of hours of work

Volunteer Management

Volunteers for Salesforce uses some standard Salesforce objects—Contacts and Campaigns—to manage volunteers

To capture the Volunteer details below mentioned data we need to capture and these fields will be available on Lead object

Object Name- Lead

Fields

• Demographic information like First name, Last name, Phone, Email, Address.
• Lead Source- Webinar, Phone Enquiry, Trade Show, Others. [To understand through which channel leads are coming are in to Better, track and qualify them]
• Lead Status- Open, Closed, Contacted, Not Contacted, Qualified, Unqualified. [Lead status helps to acknowledge where our lead is and what series of action is required to get lead qualified]
• Lead Owner- the user to which creates or owns the record. Why- [Lead owner value is important to acknowledge who owns the lead so that further actions with respect to that lead can be assigned to its owner. Using change owner, we can change the owner of the lead record]\
• Lead Record Type- helps to understand the role or nature lead belongs to. Why- Example Volunteer will be of different type like- Volunteer, Intern and the fields might be different so to differentiate we can use record types.
• Volunteer Availability- Weekdays, Weekends, Morning, Afternoon and Weekly [Indicates Volunteer Availability means in Morning/Afternoon etc.]
• Volunteer Hours- Total number of Volunteer Hours with a Status of Completed.
• Volunteer Skills- Computer usage, Manual labour, Marketing, Fundraising, Event Planning and Landscaping Why- Indicates which skills this Contact has. You can filter on skills when you look for volunteers for particular Jobs.
• Volunteer Status- Active, Inactive, New Sign Up and Prospective

Once we captured the volunteer details every system will have its different process for selection of these volunteers currently we have captured these details in Lead object. Here after completion of selection process using Lead Convert Feature and Lead mapping this lead will be converted to Contact and the Data will the reflected on Contact record as well.

Object Name- Contact

Fields

• Demographic information like First name, Last name, Phone, Email, Address
• Volunteer Status
• Volunteer Skills
• Volunteer Availability
• Volunteer Hours
• Volunteer Notes
• Volunteer Organization
• Volunteer Manager Notes
• First Volunteer Date
• Last Volunteer Date
• Volunteer Last Web Signup Date
• Volunteer Auto-Reminder Email Opt Out

Object Name- Campaign- To Create Volunteer Campaign

Features-

• Add Contact [add desired Alumni contact]
• Add Leads [add desired Alumni Lead]
• Manage Campaign members [can import campaign members]
• New Group [create and manage groups for campaign members]
• Send List Email
• Shift Calendar [view upcoming events in calendar]
• Find Volunteer [assignment of volunteer for respective jobs]
• Volunteer Roster [visualization and reporting of volunteer’s jobs and performance]
• Mass Email Volunteer [to trigger common mail to bunch of volunteers at same time]

Fields

• Campaign Name
• Campaign Owner- User who creates and manage the campaign gets the ownership of the Campaign
• Campaign Record Type- Volunteer or Event [Specifies the nature or purpose of campaign creation] Start Date & End Date
• Active- check box stating if campaign is active
• Status- Planned/ In Progress/ Completed/ Aborted [Specifies what is the stage or progress of the campaign]
• Type- Conference/ Webinar/ Trade Show/ Banner Ads/ Other [Specifies the nature of campaign in which the campaign is conducted]
• Description- brief information which describes more insights about campaign
• Groups- can manage groups as per different criteria or purpose and add campaign members, lead & contacts as group members. Campaign Member Status- Prospect/ Confirmed/ Completed/ Not Shown [Helps to acknowledge number of members attending the event or to make count of members who are interested to come, who came and who didn’t show up]
• Campaign Hierarchy -Parent or Child [Describes parent-child relationship between campaigns]
• Number of Volunteers
• Volunteer Completed Hours
• Volunteers Still Needed
• Volunteer Jobs
• Volunteer Shifts
• Volunteer Website Time Zone

Number of volunteers required for a specific event, types of volunteer jobs, shifts and hours needed, volunteers remaining to fill a job or shift and volunteer website time zone for any given event

Validations- Child Campaign can have only one parent campaign.

Object Name- Volunteer Jobs

Features-

• Find Volunteer [Track the skills volunteers have and match volunteers to jobs based on their skills and availability]
• Shift Calendar [Custom calendar that displays both available and closed shifts by campaign or display a calendar of jobs and shifts on your organization’s website and allow volunteers to sign up via the website]
• Mass Email Volunteer [Email volunteers, edit volunteer hours, create job/volunteer recurrence records]
• Volunteer shifts

Fields-

• Volunteer Job Name-
• Campaign Name
• Start Date
• End Date
• Number of shifts
• Ongoing- check box values specifies if job is ongoing
• In-active- check box value specifies if job is inactive
• Skills Needed – Fundraising, Marketing, Landscaping, Accounting
• a.i.1.a. [Describes skills required to perform the particular job]
• Number of Volunteers
• Description
• Location
• Validations– Start date should be less then end date.

Object Name– Volunteer Shifts

Features-

• Shift Calendar
• Mass Email Volunteer
• Find Volunteer
• Volunteer Roster
• Submit for Approval

Fields-

• ShiftID- Auto-generated ID
• Volunteer Job
• Start Date & Time
• Duration
• Description Desired # of Volunteers- number of volunteers required in particular shift Validations- Shifts for past dates is not visible in find volunteer page

Object Name- Volunteer Hours

Features-

Mass Edit Volunteer Hours- requires when need to modifies volunteer’s hours for bunch of volunteers.

Fields-

• First Name- of volunteer
• Last Name- of volunteer
• Volunteer shift
• Volunteer Job
• Campaign Name
• Status- Prospect/ Confirmed/ Completed/ No Show/ Cancelled
• Start Date
• End Date
• Hours Worked- hours donated by volunteer for that particular shift
• Total Hours Worked – total hours donated by volunteer overall

Volunteers hours calculated hours performed by a Volunteer for a respective job, thus same volunteer hours is reflected on volunteer’s contact record page under volunteer hour’s related list. Finally when volunteer completes the job the job status changes to Completed and automatically on Contact > Related List > Volunteer Hours – Volunteer hours details is reflected.

Volunteer Reports and Dashboards

The Volunteers Dashboard provides a ton of valuable data for the Volunteer Manager.