Volunteer Events as Campaigns in Salesforce.com
Volunteer events are outreach activities. The goal is to further the mission by getting donations of time from constituents. Another goal is to engage constituents in the work the organization is doing. You get the donation of work from the volunteer, and you also get to interact with them, and deepen the value of the relationship for both parties.
In trying to model volunteer events in Salesforce.com, the best match for this type of activity is the Campaign object. It allows you to track interactions with people, some of which will attend the event. It also rolls up all the donations that result from the event. Those donations can be volunteer hours, and cash donations.
There are a couple drawbacks to modeling volunteer events this way. You can store a lot of information about the event, but you can’t store custom information about the act of attending. You basically get a Status field, and that’s it. If you have complex volunteer roles, or other data you must capture, this probably will be lacking for you.
The other big drawback is that it’s not easy to turn volunteer event attendance into donations of time. After you have the event, you don’t want to have to hand create Opportunities for each attendee. This, it turns out, is a really easy problem to solve using a custom S-Control (of course).
With this S-Control as a custom link off of a Campaign, you can one-click create volunteer hour Opportunities for all members of a volunteer Campaign. The volunteer hours reside in Salesforce.com as Opportunities, which is what they are–donations to your organization. You can easily report on volunteer hours together separate from all the other donations that come to your organization. Here’s a look at a sample report:
You can also look at volunteer hours in combination with all other donations to your organization, and get a single picture of a constituent’s contribution to your org:
Think about the end-of-year thank you letter you could crank out with this data in a Word mail merge…
December 29th, 2005 at 1:09 pm
Hey Steve, I’ve been enjoying your blog a lot - thanks for giving us all of this insight into Salesforce.
It’s cool to see that you can adapt the structures of SF to do this sort of thing w/ volunteers. I’ll be curious to hear how many of your clients end up doing this, though.
My experience has been that many of my clients have flirted with the idea of tracking volunteer hours, but in the end none of them have gone ahead with it. (This sort of thing could be modeled in other db’s as well.) It wasn’t the lack of good tools that stopped them, or the lack of usefulness of a report like the one above - it was the ongoing time required to do the data entry. When I asked them to really consider the payoff vs. the effort required (which I always do for every part of a db), they all decided that it wasn’t worth it to try to stay up-to-date and to enter every time a volunteer shows up to do anything, and to require them to jot down hours.
This was true even for one client that is very heavily volunteer-driven. They had me create a whole custom volunteer management/scheduling/communication db, but in the end weren’t interested enough in tracking hours.
I’ve had many clients interested in knowing who’s expressed willingness to do some category of job, and in knowing who’s done which jobs in the past (for the purposes of driving later recruitment), but usually they end up wanting to be able to just check off a checkbox, rather than having to enter each act of volunteerism as a dated “line item”.
I know that some orgs are encouraged or required to track hours by their funders, but I guess I haven’t run into any of them yet. (Or they’re just not fulfilling such requests.)
So the moral of this story is just that I’ll be interested to hear if your experience has been or ends up being different. Thanks again!
January 12th, 2006 at 3:17 pm
I agree that taking the time for data entry can be a big hurdle to getting data into a shared system. It’s best to record only the information that you’ll actually use in the future, right?
One of the groups I’m currently working with has a rather extensive volunteer program. We’ll see if this works for them.
March 27th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Our organization is on the brink of adapting Saleforce to our needs, we have a consultant identified bu have not yet begun the process. As the Volunteer Manager, I am quite concerned that I can get a high level of functionality aound recruitment, retrntion, scheduling & tracking and such volunteer management needs.
I’m hoping to get a jump start on our development process by getting a sense of the existing applications around volunteer management, options, pitfalls etc. Any input would be MUCH appreciated. Thanks!
Kelly@nwpm.org 503-929-6755