Recent Updates
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Updated on: Jan 17, 2023
Admin Status of Volunteer Opportunities and Occurrences
Sometimes you might want to track volunteer opportunities, occurrences and connections strictly on the back end of the system. This is sometimes true for corporate events where volunteers will not be interacting with the website, but you still want to keep track of who volunteered and how many hours they served.
This can be done by placing a volunteer opportunity and its occurrences in Admin Status.
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Updated on: Jan 17, 2023
Email Logs in Salesforce
How many times have you had a volunteer tell you they never received a particular email when you're pretty darn sure it was sent? Ever wished you could check? Well you can. Salesforce allows you to run a log of emails sent from the system. Email logs are CSV files that contain information about all email sent through Salesforce over the last 30 days. Read on to learn how to run an email log.
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Updated on: Jan 17, 2023
Emails sent to date and time specific - 'express interest' volunteers and opportunity coordinators
Volunteers who 'express interest' are sent an email notifying them that their interest has been communicated to the partner organization.
After the partner organization confirms or denies the volunteer, email messages are sent notifying the volunteer:
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Updated on: Jan 17, 2023
Viewing your saved Searches
Searches that you've filtered on the "Find an Opportunity" page can be saved after the search has been executed. From the "My Account" tab you can also recall your saved searches and go directly to a search result.
You can also remove saved searches from your account.
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Updated on: Jan 17, 2023
Saving and Sharing Searches
Saved Searches provide a way for volunteers to easily recall a set of search parameters. This is handy if you frequently want to find, for example, date & time specific opportunities that serve children.
Saved searches are useful useful as they provide URLs that admins can use in the CMS for creating navigation items that display a specific saved, filtered-search result.
Searches and URLs for filtered search results can be created and saved from the Search page or from the Opportunity Calendar page.
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Updated on: Jan 17, 2023
Formatting Zip Code and Date / Time fields for importing into Salesforce
When importing data into Salesforce, it's important to have number fields formatted correctly. Imports will actually fail, if Date fields are not formatted properly. The two types of fields to watch out for are Zip Codes and Date / Times. When you open a csv using Microsoft Excel, Excel will apply a default formatting to these fields that is incorrect. Here is how you can avoid errors.
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Updated on: Jan 17, 2023
Using formula fields to add additional information related to lookup fields
Sometimes, you may have put a lookup field from another object into a page layout -- AND you might want some related information about the looked-up field, to also appear.
(Note: Reports are usually the best way to bring data from different objects together into an easy to see view however occasionally you may want a few items to be visible in the object record itself.)
Example: What if you want to add the mobile phone number for the Opportunity Coordinator to the Occurrence Record?
There is already a lookup for the Opportunity Coordinator name, as well as one for email.
As long as we have a lookup already in the object -- we can use formulas to bring in additional information about that 'looked-up' field.
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Updated on: Jan 17, 2023
Updating Data Example: Updating the Organization Name for Contacts
When a volunteer registers on the public site, they enter their Employer Name, but they are still assigned t the Organization Name: "Individual"
That's because their employer's name, may not already exist as an organization in our database. Or they might type a variation on the organization's name that couldn't be matched to an existing organization.
However, if a sponsor, let's say Target, asks us to provide data about all their employees volunteerism -- we might want to update the record of anyone who works for Target from individual to "Target". And we also want to update their contact type to "Employee"
To do this - we create a report to find who those contacts might be. We then export and update the data. And then import the corrected data back into Salesforce to update all the records.
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Updated on: Jan 17, 2023
How to Manage the Recycle Bin
Please note that the Recycling Bin can only store up to 5,000 items at a time. Once it has reached capacity the oldest data will be permanently deleted as new items are added to the recycling bin.
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Updated on: Jan 17, 2023
"My public site no longer works": What can happen if you delete records that are required fields in other records.
Volunteer Opportunities, Occurrences, locations and connections have lookup fields to other objects. And some of these lookup fields are required fields in another object.
So deleting a location may corrupt the record for a volunteer opportunity.
What happens if, for example, you delete a non-profit organization that is the managing organization for an active volunteer opportunity?
Answer: Bad things happen!