VolunteerMatters is proud to announce our newest system improvement. The contact chooser utility provides a powerful means to retrieve and select contacts based on their contact and biographical data. For example, you can easily retrieve contacts with similar status, skills, interests, group affiliations, certifications, and more. This latest release also allows you to choose contacts based on their past and future volunteer activity. This can include future assignments to project shifts, past volunteering, past shift withdrawals, past shift absences, and self and admin-reported volunteer interactions.
When updating email recipients or adding new volunteers to a shift, you will notice a new icon to select contacts by "Volunteering" (see image below)
After choosing to select recipients by "Volunteering" a new chooser utility opens that displays volunteer interactions for your organization. You may choose a pre-defined list view (See image below).
You may then select each individual contact you would like to include or 'Check All' to simultaneously select multiple contacts (See image below).
Remember that 'Check All' selects all records currently visible. So, if you have a list view that returns 1,000 records, but you are only displaying 25 results per page, 'Check All' will check the 25 in view - not all 1,000. If a person appears multiple times in a view (for example, if you selected a view for all who were absent for an event and there was someone who volunteer for two different shifts, they may appear on this list twice), don’t worry, they will only be added one time.
What if you would like to update the list views available in the volunteer interaction chooser? You can visit the 'Admin' menu and select the 'Volunteering' icon under the 'Interactions' group (See image below).
In order to add or edit list views, check the (+) icon to the right of the list view field. This will reveal options to edit, add, or clone (sheep) an existing view (See image below).
When creating or editing views, you may narrow the included records (e.g., to only certain types of events or contacts). For example, you can add a "Field Filter" where you may narrow the list by:
- Date - only volunteers who volunteered 'on or after' or 'before' a certain date
- Type - only volunteering of certain type(s) (types are manageable per customer and can be assigned to shifts)
- Project Name – only volunteering for specific projects
- Volunteer Role – This is the shift name/role
- Source - only volunteer activities originating from a specific source. The following are examples of the different sources:
- Volunteer Shift (a confirmed assignment)
- Volunteer Interest (expressed interest in a shift)
- Shift Withdrawal (self-withdrew from a shift)
- Shift Absence - Volunteer assignment to which the volunteer was marked absent (either an admin marked them as absent or the kiosk had no record of them signing in)
For more help in managing list views, please see the solution: Managing List Views
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