The Salesforce practice of 'cloning' records seems like a great time-saver. There is a strong temptation to clone volunteer opportunities to create similar ones, or to make changes to volunteer opportunity fields that cannot be changed after an opportunity has been created (like Project / Activity, Scheduling type of the volunteer opportunity, etc.). But cloning can actually create more problems than it solves, and we don't recommend cloning records except in very limited use cases.

We particularly caution you against cloning any records that have:

1) Lookups to other objects

2) Are normally created by the public site or via the connection grid in the occurrence object

3) Are created on behalf of partner organizations.

Here's some of the reasons why.

We looked at how teams are handled on the public site back in our first training.  But let's dive a little deeper into how team's work in HandsOn Connect.

Teams are a way to group people who want to volunteer together.  Teams have the following advantages:

They provide a way to gather statistics around a 'group' of people

• Like all the employees, spouses, family and friends of a sponsor-organization that comes out to a day of service to volunteer together.

They provide a way for a group leader to manage a 'team' of volunteers

• Example: A Corporate Team may want a single person in the organization to take responsibility for 'signing up' multiple people from the organization for a volunteer opportunity
• Civic teams,  fraternities, or sororities.   Usually one person is trying to arrange and manage the sign-up of their entire group.
• Teams are a great way to manage Families.  since volunteers under the age of 13 cannot manage their own account,  a parent or guardian can create a family team to manage signing up their minor children for family-friendly volunteer opportunities

Volunteer Teams make it possible for one person, the Team Captain, to sign-up others for volunteer opportunities. This creates an easy way for a family to volunteer together (and makes it possible for a parent to sign up children under the age of 13 for age-appropriate opportunities since federal law does not allow accounts on the site for those under 13).

Teams are also used by corporate groups (where one person wants to handle the sign-up of an entire group of employees) and college clubs.

The teams above are typically "private" teams - meaning the team captain invites people to be on the team and takes responsibility for them.

The system also supports "public" teams - which anyone may search for and join. Public teams provide a way for people to group themselves together for the purposes of communication and to make it possible to report on the activities of the 'team".