Recent Updates

  • Volunteers can upload files providing physical evidence and details of training and certifications that will be kept as part of your skills database.

  • Updated on: Jan 17, 2023

    Creating Custom Skill Categories

    HandsOn Connect allows you to add new skills to the skill profiles used by volunteers and volunteer opportunities.

    All skills need to be added to a Skill Category. You can create new Skill Categories to 'group' new custom skills in if a new skill does not fit into any of the existing skill categories in the system.

  • Want an easy way to know what occurrences and opportunities are visible on the public site?

    This report will show you exactly what's on your site, whether it requires an invitation code to see it, and how many connections are currently made for all your upcoming opportunities.

    This is a good report to put in your partner folder as its useful not just for you, but for anyone who creates volunteer opportunities.

  • We have had several HOC customers say that they wanted to be able to export a report, that includes the Volunteer Opportunity Name and also its description.

    The problem is: In order to make project descriptions look attractive on the public site, project descriptions are created in the WYSIWYG editor and are made up of html.

    As a result, you can only get html project descriptions in reports.

    However -- if its important to you to be able to do this (because you need a 'hard copy' of your projects and their descriptions - there is a somewhat painless way you can do it through some easy manual manipulation.

  • We often want to know how many connections a volunteer had in a given time period. And there is a stock report in HandsOn Connect that can answer that question for you:

    You'll find it in the HOC Basic Reports Folder: "# of Connections per vol (Calendar Yr)

  • When certains kinds of records in your database are missing required fields, it can cause problems in your system such as volunteer opportunities not showing up on your public site when intended, encountering error messages when trying to edit the records and at the most dire breaking your public site. Even though we advise you time and time again not to delete records in your system, we recognize that key data sometimes is deleted by accident. Never fear, we have installed some tools to help you diagnose the problem.

  • The easiest way to test the content and merge fields in your email templates is to simulate the conditions under which they are sent from the public site using a test account. That'll absolutely show you what happens.

    Salesforce does provide a way to test from the email template interface -- but it can be a little tricky. Here's what you need to know.

  • If you have recently made or are about to make staffing changes to your Opportunity Approval Manager, please follow these steps to transition HandsOn Connect to the new approval manager.  These steps will ensure that your new Opportunity Approval Manager gets all the notifications they should of new opportunities and occurrences being submitted and of changes to existing opportunities and occurrences.  If the new approval manager is new to your staff you will first need to set them up with a user login for Salesforce and then follow the steps below.

  • This lesson assumes that you have already imported contacts into the system for the users that you wish to create and that you have already set up the Apex Data Loader.