Volunteers

Constituents who give their time and skills are often your organization's most dedicated supporters. These people choose to spend parts of their lives, rather than just their money, on behalf of your mission. Don't underestimate the value of their contributions.

We recommend you use the volunteer user-defined field set to help track volunteer information. For information about how to add a defined field set, refer to Add Defined Field Sets. Alternatively, you could manually create the recommended fields. For more information, refer to Create UDFs to Track Volunteers

Then, use these user-defined fields to track information about constituents who volunteer. From a constituent account, access the Defined Fields page. Click the Volunteer Information category, select appropriate values for each field, and then click Save. For more information about the defined fields page, refer to Defined Fields Page.

To make it easier for constituents to sign up to volunteer, create a registration webpage using DIY forms. For details, refer to Create a volunteer page.

The constituent may volunteer on many different occasions. Each time a constituent volunteers for your organization, open the constituent account and click Journal. Add a new contact or edit an existing contact to track the constituent's volunteer hours, team, project or event, using the user-defined fields for volunteers. For information about how to add or edit journal entries, refer to Journal.

Remember to thank your volunteers regularly. You can personalize the letter with details from journal entries, including hours, team, project, and event information. Refer to Thank You Letters.

If volunteers help with data entry in eTapestry, assign them the user account role and adjust your security settings to restrict the data they can access and edit. For information about security, refer to Security.

You can create queries based on your volunteer needs. We recommend you create a category called "Volunteer Queries." For information about queries, refer to Queries. You can also report on volunteer information. We recommend you create a category called "Volunteer Reports." For general information about reports, refer to Reports .

• Consider creating a report to track the volunteer total hours. The report should include a column for the user-defined field called Volunteer Hours. To create a total for a group of volunteers, for Grouping click Account and for Group Options click Show Totals. This will show the total hours for each volunteer in the query.

• To create a report of all of your volunteer related fields from the Defined Fields page of the constituent account and the volunteer information for Journal Contacts, use a query with a data return type of Journal Entries.

Tip: Do you use VolunteerHub? VolunteerHub is cloud-based software that streamlines volunteer and event management. It assists organizations by providing scheduling, communication, and tracking. It also automates many day-to-day volunteer coordination tasks such as email communication, collection of volunteer contact information, skills, and liability waivers, event registrations, cancellations, and waitlists. It also integrates with eTapestry. For more information, contact VolunteerHub or contact your Blackbaud account representative.