Volunteer Overview

The volunteer features in ExceedFurther allow you to store information about volunteer skills, preferences, availability, hours worked, awards, and any number of other information items that you need. You can create volunteer job descriptions and assign volunteers to those jobs, send email reminders and thank-you letters, and record who showed up and how long they worked. You can view your volunteer schedule in calendar form and see exactly where there are gaps in the schedule.

Volunteers are entered in households and organizations, just like any other person. When you add a volunteer's name, you can mark them as a volunteer on the Add Person step. Additional information about individual volunteers, including their interests and skills and their availability, is stored on the Volunteer tab of the Bio tab.

You create job definitions, along with associated tasks, in the Volunteer Manager. You also place these jobs into a schedule and then move volunteer names into each job slot. The resulting schedule appears in calendar form on the Calendar tab in the manager or in list form on the Schedules tab in the manager.

You can create volunteer sign up forms online, and you can incorporate your jobs and schedules into the forms. When volunteers sign up, you can include them into the schedule.

When volunteers have been scheduled, you can send them an email or mail reminder. After the scheduled date as passed, volunteer hours are automatically updated, but you can adjust those hours or mark volunteers as canceled or no-show if they did not work as expected.

If you do not want volunteer hours to be automatically updated every day, you can instead manually mark those who worked from the Schedules tab. To turn off automatic updates, go to the Admin tab, Client Defaults, Volunteer section, and uncheck the box marked "Auto Update Volunteer Hours."

You can schedule volunteers into time slots on the calendar without first scheduling jobs if that is easier. You can also schedule volunteers directly from the Volunteer tab on the Bio tab rather than using the Volunteer Manager.

If you don't want to use schedules at all, but just record hours worked, use Quick Add Volunteer Hours.

Once volunteers have worked, you can create in-kind gifts to reflect their service to your organization. These gifts have a value equal to the hours worked multiplied by an hourly rate determined by the job that they performed.

If you have some projects that need volunteers, but you don't yet know when they might be scheduled, you can add them to a pending Projects list.

Getting started with volunteers

To create a volunteer schedule, you need to do the following steps. Click on the links to see more detailed information about each step.

1. Decide what information you need to collect about each potential volunteer. You can create tags to record volunteer interests, skills, and later, awards. You can add additional types of tags or other user-defined fields if you need them.
   1. You don't need to define every possible tag or field at the beginning. You can always add additional items as you need them in the future.
2. Add your volunteer names.
   1. If a volunteer name is already in your list, perhaps because they are also a donor, search for the name and mark it as a volunteer.
   2. If a volunteer is part of an organization or company, add them to the organization, or add the organization if it isn't in your data yet.
   3. If the volunteer is not part of an organization, add them as a new household.
3. Add additional details about your volunteers, including their availability, on the Volunteer sub tab of the Bio tab.
   1. Adding volunteers' availability will help when you are scheduling them to work. It is not required, however.
4. Use the Volunteer Manager to define jobs, tasks and projects and add them to the volunteer schedule calendar.
   1. Jobs can be grouped as part of an event or a project or they can stand alone. Tasks provide finer detail for jobs and are linked to jobs.
   2. A stand alone job might be something that is needed every day, like a greeter at the front desk. When you plan a special event, on the other hand, you may have many jobs that are done just once, at the time of the event. These jobs would be grouped with the event.
   3. A job may have several tasks. For example, at an event there may be the tasks of putting the center pieces on the table, placing the name cards and ensuring that the check-in list matches the table assignments. These might be grouped into the job of "table coordinator."
   4. Jobs can also be grouped into a project. Projects, like events, are generally a discrete thing, like building a house. There are many tasks that need to be completed, and these can be grouped into jobs and put on the project schedule.
   5. Tasks, events and projects are optional. You can define a job without including any further detail.
   6. When you add a job to the schedule, you also indicate how many volunteers are needed in that time slot for that job.
5. If you want to provide for volunteers to sign up online, create sign up forms for the jobs and schedules you have defined. As volunteers sign up, they are added to the schedule, and appropriate tags and user defined fields may be added to their biographical record as defined by the form.
   1. You can also create simple sign up forms that allow people to indicate certain volunteer interests and skills without signing up for a particular job and schedule. These volunteers are added to ExceedFurther with the volunteer tags and fields  that you specify in the design of the form.
6. Assign volunteers to the scheduled jobs or projects.
   1. You can assign a volunteer to work at a certain time without first adding the job to the schedule. If you have added the job to the schedule first, you can see how many volunteers have been assigned and what the need is.
7. Periodically check to see if you have new transactions from volunteer online sign ups that need to be matched and brought into the schedule.
8. Send volunteers a confirming email or call them. You can use the Schedules tab of the Volunteer Manager to select volunteers who have been scheduled and send an email or letter using the Mail/Email button.
9. After the volunteers have worked, mark them as having worked and update their hours.
   1. In the Client Defaults tab of the Admin tab, you can have the system automatically assume everyone worked their hours. You would then only need to make changes to the volunteer records for people who did not show up or who worked a different number of hours from the expected schedule. You can make these changes from the Schedules tab of the Volunteer Manager.
10. If you wish, you can create in-kind gifts to add to the giving history of the volunteers who worked.