Your site has several great features and benefits in place to help you boost your volunteer engagement! We know you're ready to start sharing those amazing Opportunities with your community, so here's a breakdown of how to get started:
- The first step is to create a program that you can post Opportunities to on your site!
- A Program is where you manage your volunteer Opportunities, so you must have at least one Program to start creating Opportunities.
- After you have created a Program, you can then start posting and sharing those Opportunities so that volunteers can respond to them.
- As volunteers start engaging with and responding to your organization's Opportunities, you'll start collecting volunteer hours which will reflect on their resumes and in your reporting.
- Your volunteers can submit their own hours or you can submit hours on behalf of volunteers.
Let's get started creating opportunities for your site!
Programs are a way for volunteer Opportunities to be grouped and sorted on a site, kind of like buckets holding a variety of fruit!
- For example, let's say your organization has a Program dedicated to a local soup kitchen, the Opportunities posted to that Program might include:
- Come ladle soup at the Soup Kitchen!
- Help re-stock the Soup Kitchen pantry!
- Calling all soup-oisseurs to make nutritious and delicious soups for our Soup Kitchen!
- Delivery Drivers Needs M-F Shifts Available
- Or, maybe you have a Program dedicated to a small non-profit in your area that offers several services to the community, like:
- Stitch Bereavement Keepsakes
- Back-to-school backpack event
- Community cleanup at the Garden Center
- Programs can even be set up for task-based Opportunities, location-based Opportunities, etc.
- The volunteer Opportunities posted in a Program are dependent on that Program's purpose and mission.
Another way to think of Programs and Opportunities is with this house metaphor:
In other words, a volunteer site can "house" several Programs.
- Each "room" in that house can be considered an individual "Program" with its own purpose and use.
- You fill each of those "rooms" (Programs) with "stuff" (unique volunteer Opportunities).