Volunteers are a super important part of many nonprofit organizations. Volunteer efforts can help your organization lower costs while providing excellent services and building a community of people with a shared mission. Volunteers also help your organization by being potential donors to help with fundraising efforts and grant-making.

With Volunteer Management in Nonprofit Cloud, you can improve every step of the volunteer process, from managing initiatives to sign-up and time tracking to reporting, and keep all of the data directly inside Salesforce. We will show you how Volunteer Management in Salesforce can help you track your volunteers and their excellent work to streamline the volunteer experience and keep your organization efficient and effective!

Setup

To use Volunteer Management, you must assign the "Volunteer Management User" permission group to all users needing access. This will give your assigned users the necessary permissions to use Volunteer Management while giving them access to new objects such as Volunteer Initiative, Job Position, Action Plan, etc. You should also turn on Volunteer Management under the Volunteer Management Settings section under Setup.

Suppose you want to allow volunteers to sign up through an Experience Cloud site. In that case, you must ensure that all authenticated portal users are given the "Manage Volunteer Work In Experience Cloud" permission set and all guest users have the "Volunteer Management in Experience Cloud Guest Access" permission set.  

Planning

Volunteer Management will allow you to handle all the prep work for a volunteer initiative. You can create the new initiative and assign all positions that will be available for potential volunteers to sign up for. This includes setting up the dates of the initiative, the different shifts available for each position, and any qualifications that might be required for a given position.

To allow users to easily apply for volunteer program positions, Volunteer Managers can create application forms directly in Salesforce to take and log information about potential volunteers who want to sign up for a given position. This will help managers decide which volunteers are the best fit for the initiative.

When a Volunteer Manager creates a volunteer position, they can link those positions directly to benefits. These benefits can be reported in tandem with Program Management to show which benefits have been provided by the volunteers signing up for each position. This is just one of many ways NPC connects your nonprofit's different departments.

Volunteer Sign-Up

Volunteer hours can be tracked manually directly in Salesforce. Managers can create new records to assign a given volunteer to the Job Position Assignment and track their hours as they are completed.

To make it easier for the manager and flexible for the volunteer, you can also allow volunteers to sign up and manage their hours through an experience cloud site. You can create and customize an experience site that shows the available volunteer positions and volunteer shifts, lets the users claim those positions, and then tracks their hours, all without a manager needing to get involved.

A volunteer can also set their availability on the experience site so that a volunteer manager can work with the volunteer to find a suitable position and shift. This flexibility makes it easy for the volunteer to get the paperwork out of the way and start with the work they offer!

Reporting

With all these new objects that come with Volunteer Management, a manager is more empowered than ever to report on the different aspects of their department. For instance, the manager could run a report to find the most active volunteers in hopes of finding dedicated people to help fill a position. The manager could also run a report to see which jobs require the most volunteers. Though these are just a couple of examples, there are many ways that you will be able to manage and report on your volunteers with Volunteer Management.

Pricing

We're happy to say that Volunteer Management is included in the Nonprofit Cloud Enterprise edition and above! This should hopefully make it a no-brainer to use the various tools that Volunteer Management can provide at no additional cost!

Conclusion

Volunteer management can be a complicated and time-consuming process. Fortunately, Salesforce now provides the tools to handle it within your Salesforce org with Nonprofit Cloud! By building out your initiatives in Salesforce and working directly to streamline volunteer sign-ups and track volunteer hours, you will run those initiatives more smoothly than ever. We hope that you find these new features helpful. For help with Volunteer Management or anything else in your Salesforce org, contact us at DB Services. We would be happy to help!