Volunteers for Salesforce.com (NPSP) – Intro

The Volunteers for Salesforce (v4s) is an integrated application as downloaded in the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP)

This application allows you to link:

• Volunteers (also known in Salesforce v4s as “Contacts“)
• Volunteer Roles (known in Salesforce v4s as “Jobs“)
• Volunteer Shifts and
• Volunteer Hours.
• Within Projects (known in Salesforce v4s as “Campaigns” – similar to a “marketing campaign” where you’d be prospecting for Donors.  In this case, we are prospecting for/tracking Volunteers.

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Here’s the link to to the overview: Manage Volunteers for Nonprofits

As with any database, the key is to understand the structure.  Take a look at this PAGE – the 2nd picture is a link to a 1 minute video that provides a good introduction to Volunteers for Salesforce – V4S.

Initial Step – click this LINK to a short, 1:29 (1 min, 29 second) youtube video showing how to navigate within Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack – from the opening Welcome Page showing how to get to the Volunteers V4S Application.

Step 1 – Creating a Campaign – (1:56 min youtube video) necessary because Volunteer Jobs (“roles”) must be associated with a Campaign.

Step 2 – Creating a Volunteer Job – (3:07 min youtube video) shows how to build a new Job and clone and existing Job.

Step 3 – Creating Volunteer Job Shifts – (4:42 min youtube video) 2 options for navigating to a Volunteer Job and creating and cloning Job Shifts.

Step 4 – Assigning Volunteers to Shifts using Shift Calendar and Mass Edit Volunteer Hours – (4:51 min youtube video)