A lot of the information you will want to get out of your data is about people who have volunteered. And that information will be found in the Connection Record.

You will want your primary object for certain kinds of reports to be the Connection object -- however when you go create the custom report type - you'll find the secondary objects aren't there! You COULD choose to build the report around the Contact object - but there's a better way.

You can get to fields you might not otherwise access, through the lookup fields that are in an object. And the Connections record is FILLED with lookups!

Let's say we wanted to get a report on all connections, that included the Volunteer Type, the Location name, and other fields from other objects.

You can choose any dashboard you have access to as the one that appears on your HOME tab.

Only the top three components of the dashboard are visible on the Home Tab.

Dashboards are accessed through the Dashboard Tab, and organized into folders.

When you click on the Dashboard Tab you will brought to the last dashboard you had viewed.

When a New Custom Report Type is created, The fields of the various objects available to the report are made accessible when you create reports of that type. However, custom fields that you add to objects AFTER the custom report type was defined, will not automatically be present. That's because you can control what fields are available in a report. You can remove fields that make a report too difficult to work with, or add fields that are missing.

You can also add fields that are related to objects by lookups, instead of adding yet another object to the field!

Whenever the number of connections for an occurrence drops below the maximum number of signups permitted, a workflow sends an email to all volunteers who are in the waitlist notifying them that space is now available for signup. The template used for this is "Waitlisted opportunity now open"