We know how important it is for organizations to recruit, organize, schedule, and manage their volunteers' activities. The good news is, there are a plethora of different ways that you can manage Volunteers in Keela! This article will outline some of the many ways you can use Keela's tools for Volunteer Management.
Volunteer Recruitment
If you are interested in recruiting more volunteers to support your organization, we reccomend using a Custom Form. You can add Custom Fields and Questions to your Form to collect whichever data you need. For example, you could have new volunteers sign up and include questions related to their availability and volunteer interests. You can even set up auto-tagging under The Settings Tab of your form so contacts who fill out the form will be automatically tagged (e.g. you could Tag them as 'Prospective Volunteer'). Once they fill out the form, their information will be automatically updated in Keela and you'll have their contact information ready to go!
Another great tip is that you can even add a Form to Email Marketing, so if you have contacts in mind that you want to reach out to about volunteer opportunities, you can send the sign-up form out to those contacts in mass!
Contacting Volunteers
Once, you have your Volunteer contact information in Keela, you can start thinking about reaching out! You can reach out to your Volunteers via Direct Email for more personalized & specific emails, or you can use Email Marketing for updates and calls to action! For example, you could send Email Marketing to a Tag of 'Prospective Volunteers' who mentioned they are available on Mondays and request their support for next Monday's event.
Managing Volunteer Information
In addition to collecting information from prospective volunteers via a Custom Form (as discussed above), you can also manually log volunteer information under the contacts profile. You can create Custom Fields where you can store just about any information that you want. For example, maybe some of your volunteers are responsible for a certain group of beneficiaries, you could add this information in a Custom Field.
Volunteer Reporting
So now that you have your volunteers Tagged and the information stored, you can take advantage of Keela's Filter tool which will allow you to Report on volunteer information. If you want to take a pick at some of the most common volunteer reports and steps on how to create them, head to Volunteer Activity Reports.
Volunteer Activities
Our built-in Volunteer tool allows you to log, monitor, and view volunteer hours, tasks, and activities! You can log your volunteer activities right under a contact's profile or Import Volunteer Activities in bulk! This way you have a living history of your volunteers' contribution to your organization. We have a bunch of information on our Volunteer tool in the article Volunteer Activities for a Contact.
Tip: want your volunteers to feel appreciated? Send them a Direct Email with the number of hours they have contributed! You can even include how much money their hours saved you and how that money was re-directed into your programs.
Volunteer Projects
Are your volunteers working on a project that they are collaborating on? If so, you may want to consider moving their project tasks into Keela using the Projects tool. The project tool allows you and your team of volunteers to create a list of tasks, set deadlines, assign team members, prioritize, and even group chat!
Volunteer User Permissions
It's common that organizations prefer to set permission levels for volunteers to manage their access to certain information in the account. For more information on the permission levels Keela offers and which tools the levels allow access to, we recommend visiting our article on User Permission Levels. We find that many organizations prefer the 'Coordinator' level for Volunteers, as it restricts access to donor data and limits editing permission for things like campaigns - however, it gives access to Projects and other tools that Volunteers are likely to use.