Manage Email and Report on Volunteer Participation

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Grasp how automated emails work in Volunteers for Salesforce (V4S).
• Manually mass email your volunteers using templates.
• Use a dashboard to understand your volunteers’ work.

Volunteer Email Automation

You want to make it easy for your volunteers to help out, so it’s critically important to get volunteers the information they need, when they need it.

But managing all those emails is time consuming. Fortunately, Volunteers for Salesforce (V4S) has preconfigured email templates for all the typical volunteer messages.

V4S also includes automation that triggers sending emails at the appropriate times. Your admin can deactivate or modify the automation if you need something different for your organization.

Let’s first look at all of the V4S email templates.

1. From Setup, enter Email Templates in the Quick Find box, then select Classic Email Templates.
2. From the Folder dropdown list, select Volunteer Email Templates. The complete list of V4S templates appears.
   
   
3. Because Enoch, the volunteer coordinator at our (fictional) nonprofit No More Homelessness (NMH), just assigned his volunteer, Peter, to a shift at NMH’s Bullard House, he clicks Volunteer Job Signup Thank You.

Let’s check out that email template.

The template consists of text and merge fields that pull data from the V4S objects and fields. This is what the actual email that Peter receives looks like. 

Of course, you can create your own templates for any email notification. You can also modify the existing email templates to add images, formatting, and more to make your emails even more helpful and attention-grabbing. Check out Configure Email Notifications and Email Templates in the Resources section for more.

Note

If you’d like to modify the workflow rule that sends this email—or create a new one—check out the documentation and help links in the Resources section.

Manually Email Volunteers

Automation is great, but sometimes you want to email volunteers on the fly. For example, NMH emails volunteers if an event is canceled, to provide additional information, or to remind them that their shift is coming up. V4S helps send all of these messages.

Let’s follow along with Enoch as he emails his volunteers to let them know that their shift is coming up. 

Again, if you want to follow along and haven’t entered the same contact, campaign, job, and shift data as our example, you can use the corresponding data in your own organization. But, wait! If you follow along with these steps and click Send, Salesforce will send an email to any volunteers you selected who have a valid email address. Yes, a real email to their real inboxes. Proceed with caution!

1. Click the Shift Calendar tab in the Volunteers app.
2. Click on a shift with volunteers assigned to open the volunteer shift record.
3. On the volunteer shift record, click the menu arrow () in the Quick Actions bar and then click Mass Email Volunteers. You can also find this option on the volunteer job record, but that would email all volunteers assigned to all of the volunteer job’s related shifts.
4. The Mass Email Volunteers page lets you fine-tune the details about the email you’re about to send. Let’s check out each field and fill in some details.
   
   1. From: Select the person to receive replies sent by volunteers. Because Enoch is the volunteer coordinator for NMH, he selects his own name.
   2. Email volunteers with Status: You can limit email to volunteers who have a specific status—for example, Confirmed or Prospect. Enoch selects Confirmed.
   3. Include Contacts only once: This option prevents contacts from being sent the same email more than once. It’s useful if you’re using Mass Email Volunteers from a volunteer job record, because you might have a single contact who’s signed up for many shifts. Enoch doesn’t select this option now.
   4. Log an Activity for each email sent: This option creates an activity record linked to the volunteer’s contact record. Enoch likes to track which emails have been sent to whom, so he selects this option.
   5. Choose a template type: The object you choose must match the object that the email template is based on. Enoch chooses Volunteer Shift.
   6. Email Template: Choose the email template you want to send. Enoch picks the Volunteer Shift Reminder template, and a preview appears below that field.
5. Click Send.

Just like that, all of your volunteers are in the loop.

View Volunteer Reports and Dashboards

V4S comes with reports and dashboards that provide all kinds of information about your volunteer programs. You can use these reports and dashboards to analyze volunteer trends and help you decide where to focus your volunteer efforts. 

V4S provides more than 25 different reports, including a list of available jobs, top volunteers, upcoming shifts, and people who volunteered last month. (For a full list of reports, see the documentation link in the Resources section.)

V4S also provides a nifty dashboard with tons of valuable data. Let’s look at the Volunteers Dashboard.

1. Click the Dashboards tab.
2. Click All Dashboards.
3. Find and select the Volunteers Dashboard.

The dashboard appears.  

And there you have it. You’ve seen how V4S can streamline all of the administrative tasks around managing volunteers. So get started with V4S in your own organization, and see firsthand what an amazing asset it can be.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Stay in Touch with Your Volunteers
• Salesforce Help: Email Templates in Salesforce Classic
• Salesforce Help: Workflow
• Salesforce Help: Configure Email Notifications and Email Templates
• Salesforce Help: Track Volunteer Participation with Reports and Dashboards
• Salesforce Help: Volunteers for Salesforce (V4S) Documentation
• Trailblazer Community Group: Volunteers for Salesforce (V4S) App