Sign Up Volunteers Through Your Website
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Test your site registration form.
- Explain what happens in Volunteers for Salesforce (V4S) when a volunteer signs up for a shift on your website.
- Find contact and volunteer hours records in Salesforce created from the volunteer sign-up form.
Sign Up Volunteers
Now that we have our Volunteers for Salesforce (V4S) site set up, let’s test our sign-up form by signing up for a volunteer shift.
If you left your site after the last unit, you can get back to it by entering your Salesforce Sites URL followed by /GW_Volunteers__VolunteersJobListingFS. You can find your site URL on the Sites page in Setup.
We’ll use the example site for the (fictional) nonprofit No More Homelessness (NMH). NMH Volunteer Coordinator Enoch Allen wants to test his new site. Since he plans to volunteer to restock the NMH food pantry next Thursday, he decides to sign up for that shift and then verify the data in Salesforce.
- If you’re following along and created the same data we used in the Volunteer Registration in V4S Trailhead module, click sign up for a food pantry shift. Otherwise, click sign up next to any available shift in your own test site.
- Enter the required information. Enter your own name and email address.
- Click Sign Up.
Cool! We have our first volunteer sign-up from the new site!
Verify the Volunteer’s Records in Salesforce
Let’s check out the data created in Salesforce as a result of the sign-up.
V4S searches for a contact match based on first name, last name, and email. If no match is found, V4S creates a contact record.
Enoch knows he doesn't yet have a contact record in Salesforce, so he expects V4S to create one based on the information he entered in the volunteer sign-up form. He enters his name in Global Search and voila! There it is!
Now let’s find the new volunteer hours record for Enoch. The record is related to his contact record, but let’s find it now through the volunteer job and volunteer shift record to make sure all of the records are properly related.
Enoch finds the shift he signed up for on the Food Pantry Inventory and Restocking volunteer job page. Follow along by navigating to the volunteer job page for the shift you signed up for.
- On the Volunteer Jobs tab in the Volunteers app, click the volunteer job for which you signed up. Enoch clicks Food Pantry Inventory and Restocking.
- Click the Related tab on the volunteer job record.
- On the Volunteer Shifts related list, click your ShiftID to get to the volunteer shift record.
- Click the Related tab on the volunteer shift record.
- Check the Volunteer Hours related list, and there’s our record.
Understand Volunteer Emails
V4S can be configured to automatically send an email to thank volunteers for signing up. The email is tracked on a contact's Activity Timeline to show that the message has been sent.
We didn't cover email set-up in this module. For details, read Configure Email Notifications for Website Integration in Salesforce Help.
Now that we know the pages work, let’s customize and add them to your organization’s website. That’s what we’ll do in the next unit.