About Volunteer Engagement Custom Fields

Volunteer Engagement is a service included with Pro Membership that will allow you to better engage with your volunteers. Custom Fields (1) allows you to create additional fields on your connections’ profiles to help you manage and identify additional information about a connection. For example, if your organization requires volunteers to have certain qualifications, or, you want to organize them into groups for an event, you can use this tool to do all of that. Once these fields have been added, they will appear on both a connection’s profile and become available in Search People.

Custom Fields have been broken down into three categories:

1. Qualifications (2)—Here is where you can add a field to track whether a connection has a necessary qualification to work with your organization. For example, “Completed Orientation” or “STEM Training”. To add a Qualification, type in a title or name for the qualification you want to track and click Add

2. General Interests (3)—This section can be useful when planning what roles/activities you might assign a connection; this may be information that you gather in an application or over the course of additional communication with the connection. These can be related to general interests or even roles in your organization. Like with Qualifications, it is very straightforward to add a General Interest field. Enter the name of your field and click Add.

3. Additional Fields (4)—Use this option to add any fields that don’t fall into the Qualifications or General Interests options but that would still be useful for you to identify. For example, if you have a large group of volunteers coming in for a certain opportunity and want to organize them into groups, you can create a field for Groups and then have a drop-down list with different group identifiers, such as Orange Group. That way you can pre-assign your connections to groups so when they show up on the day you’re ready to go! And, remember, you’ll be able to easily search for connections by Group in the Search by Other Criteria option in Search People. To add an Additional Field, simply follow these steps:

1. Click “Create a New Field” to get the pop-up form
2. Enter a Field Name, and Field Type
3. If you select “Dropdown” or “Checkboxes” then you’ll enter the options you want included for either of those choices. 
4. When done, click “Save”