Volunteer Opportunities
Volunteer Opportunities are items in DonorPoint that create Volunteer Activities when added to landing pages, catalogs and community fundraisers. They share the common item properties (see Working with Items) excluding pricing:
- Name - the name of the opportunity
- Internal Name - a name displayed in the admin application for management purposes
- Description - the description of the opportunity, used in forms
- Image - image used in forms
- Custom Fields - flexible additional fields for merchandise sizes, waiver checkoffs, meal selections or restrictions, etc.
- Integration Codes - additional fields used in reports or for importing into external applications
- Restrictions - start and end times for accepting transactions, limits
- Confirmation - information to be included on email confirmations
In addition Volunteer Opportunities have these specific properties:
- Impacted Organization - the organization receiving the benefit of the effort, if the containing Volunteer Event has an Impacted Organization, the Impacted Organization for the Volunteer Opportunity will default to it. Different volunteer opportunities in an event can have different impacted organizations, to support umbrella or open volunteer day events.
Shifts
Shifts are specific times and jobs that volunteers can sign up for. Shifts have a date/time range, a job, location, and an optional capacity. Using shifts you can control how many volunteers of various types that you have available during the event:
- For volunteer events with only one location and job or volunteer role, you can control the number who can sign up per shift
- For volunteer events with different jobs or volunteer roles, you can control the number of each type who sign up each how - for example you can set capacity for 4 bag packers and 2 bag distributors per hour. In online forms shifts are selected by selecting the location first, if multiple locations are available for the volunteer opportunity, then the job and shift combination from those available at the selected location.
The job, start time and end time in shifts set the job, hours awarded to each volunteer activity by default. THese values are used in calendar reminders attached to confirmation emails. These values can be changed later to reflect actual effort performed.
Additional Contacts
Volunteer Opportunities can leverage the Additional Contacts feature of items to allow volunteers to register additional people online. Rules can be set up for ‘plus ones’ and groups, where DonorPoint will create the correct number of volunteer activities. See Items - Additional Contacts for details. Note that in workplace campaigns, the organization on volunteer activities for additional contacts will not be set to the workplace by default, and will not appear on volunteering dashboards and reports for the organziation. The employer organization for voilunteers entered as additional contacts must be assigned in the admin application after the fact, or set by post-processing script.
Creating Volunteer Opportunities
Volunteer Opportunities are created from the Volunteer Events list Create Volunteer Event wizard or by adding Volunteer Opportunities to an existing Volunteer Event. The Volunteer Event wizard creates one or more volunteer opportunities, jobs and shifts, and automatically creates a Volunteer Event to contain them. Additional templates for specific volunteer scenarios are available on the Activities view.
Adding Volunteer Opportunities to Forms
Volunteer opportunities are added to landing pages, catalogs and community fundraisers in the same was an other DonorPoint items, see Adding Categories and Items to your Catalog for details.
Order Items
Like all items in DonorPoint, when a Volunteer Opportunity is added ot a form and the form is submitted, a transaction record is created with a line item for each volunteer opportunity in the transcation. The line items for Volunteer Opportunities include the shift that was selected by the volunteer for later reference.