Volunteering Basics
Volunteer Opportunities are items in the DonorPoint catalog which can be placed on online forms or selected in back-office registrations. A volunteer registers online by adding a volunteer opportunity to an online form and checking out. Volunteer Opportunities share the common properties of items in DonorPoint (except pricing) and have additional properties specific to volunteering. These are:
- Job - the type of work being performed
- Shift - the scheduled date/time range of the opportunity
- Location - the site at which the work is being performed
- Impacted Organization - the organization receiving the benefit of the volunteer effort.
Volunteer Opportunities are collected into Volunteer Events for management purposes. Templates in DonorPoint allow you to create simple volunteer opportunities quickly and easily, and more complex opportunities effciently.
When a volunteer submits a form that includes a volunteer opportunity, a Volunteer Instance is created in the database and associated with the transaction, their contact and organization (employer) records, the impacted organization, and the volunteer event. So Volunteer Instances can be managed and report on from within the contact and organization records, the form, the impacted organization or the volunteer event.
Volunteering in DonorPoint is built on other DonorPoint modules to provide its rich functionality, enabling you to adopt volunteer opportunities rapidly:
- Mass Emails can be scheduled for delivery to volunteers pre and post-event.
- Volunteer Opportunities can have custom fields added to them to prompt for clothing sizes, waivers, meal preferences, etc.
- Volunteer Opportunities and Jobs can be coded to enrich reports used to integration with external applications.
Organizations hosting Workplace Campaigns can support volunteer opportunities specific to their workplaces, including restrictions based on location or workgroup, and logged in employees can access their volunteer history in their workplace portal.