Track and Identify Your Volunteers

Create a Contact

Create new Contacts to track potential and current Volunteers in Volunteers for Salesforce.

1. Click the Contacts tab. If you don't see the Contacts tab, click the App Launcher (), then click All Items.
2. Click New.
3. Enter the person's name, email, address, and any other information you have.
4. Click Save.

Capture Volunteer Skills and Availability

Often when planning an event, you know that you need volunteers with special skills. For example, the local kitchen where Sarah volunteers needs people with food preparation skills. And when the kitchen's web developer recently revamped the website, she recruited volunteers with computer skills.

Volunteers for Salesforce provides fields on the Contact to track a volunteer's skills, status (whether the volunteer is active or not), and availability (days and times during the week). These fields are conveniently located in a Volunteer Information section on the Contact record.

Note If you don't see these fields, you might need to edit your Contact page layout to include them. Administrators can also customize the values in each field to match the needs of your organization. See Capture Volunteer Skills and Availability for more information.

1. Navigate to the volunteer's Contact record.
2. In the Volunteer Information section, double-click on one of the fields to edit.
3. Enter information as needed. Pay special attention to these fields, as they are useful when trying to find specific volunteers:
   • Volunteer Status—the status of the volunteer. Values include Active, Inactive, New Sign Up, and Prospective.
     

     Note When you assign a Volunteer to a job or shift and select a Status of Confirmed or Completed, the Volunteer Status field is automatically updated to Active.
   • Volunteer Skills—the special skills the volunteer possesses. Ctrl+click to select multiple values.
   • Volunteer Availability—the days and times of day that the Contact is available to volunteer. Ctrl+click to select multiple values.
   
4. Click Save.

Now you can use this information to find volunteers.

Find Volunteers

If you've entered skills and availability information for some of your volunteers, you can use the Find Volunteers feature to locate volunteers you need for a specific type of job.

1. Click the Find Volunteers tab.
2. Choose your criteria. By default, you can search using the volunteer-specific fields: Volunteer Status, Volunteer Availability, and Volunteer Skills. Admins can also expand the search criteria to include more Contact fields. See Configure Fields on the Find Volunteers Page for more information.
   
3. Click Find to see a list of matching Contacts.
   

Once you find the volunteers you need, you can assign them to a Job or Shift right from the results section of the page.