We all know the saying, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail!” Luckily, VolunteerLocal equips volunteer coordinators with a whole toolkit to manage, schedule, and communicate with volunteers. Today, we’re showing some love to a small batch of often-overlooked features with big impacts.

Search Tool

Where to find it: Volunteers > Search

This one is fairly well known. However, did you know that you can search for volunteers not only by their name and email address, but also by keyword? As long as the information exists in their volunteer profile, you can zero-in on it using the Search tool. 

Scheduled Messages

Where to find it: Volunteers > Communication

Write up your email (or text message), then click “schedule for later” to send the email at a date and time that you indicate. For example, let’s consider reminder emails. Before, you’d need to create a reminder for yourself, just to remind your volunteers of an upcoming shift! Ironic, huh? 

With our “schedule for later” option in the Communication tools (email and SMS), you can schedule all of your reminder emails in one sitting. 

Hidden Fields

Where to find it: Events > Your Events > Volunteer Information

The volunteer information page allows you to create a custom registration form. Collect any information you need from your volunteers upon sign up — their name, phone number, emergency contact, and just about anything else you can think of!

However, you can also create “hidden” fields in this volunteer information form. These fields cannot be seen by the volunteer — only you and other admin users on your account! For example, you might want to take notes on a volunteer as you discover their skills and interests. Or perhaps you want to mark whether they’ve been approved for certain volunteer positions. All of these fields can be created as a private, hidden field.

Volunteer Profile Options

Where to find it: Account > Settings

Make your volunteers’ profile feel like home! Customize the header content of every volunteers’ profile, complete with a warm thank-you, further instructions, or more information about your organization.

Cancelled Volunteer Reports

Where to find it: Home > Dashboard > Customize Your Dashboard

When this feature is enabled, you’ll be able to review a report of all volunteers who cancelled their signups, along with the event/job/shift they cancelled, and the timestamp of the cancellation. This way, you can consult these records anytime you need to track a volunteer’s cancellation history. 

If you’d like to learn more about any specific tools and features in VolunteerLocal, send us an email (hello@volunteerlocal.com)! We’ll show you exactly how to make magic happen with that tool in your tool kit.