Salesforce!

Hi all!

I see there's been a lot of posts about volunteer management programs, but I thought I'd make one specifically about Salesforce.  I work at Goodwill in San Francisco, and we don't currently have a volunteer program, but my job is to create one.  We already track our donors in Salesforce, so people are saying that I should find a way to track volunteers with it too.  I've seen other organizations do this, but their Salesforce is highly customized.  Ours is pretty much out of the box, and it's not clear to me at all how it could be used for volunteers.  I can't see a way to track peoples' hours, which I think is crucial.  Has anyone else here used Salesforce for volunteers?  Or should I just use something else?

Thanks in advance!

Hi,

Are you just looking to track volunteer hours, or are you interested in tracking other aspects of organizational volunteer interactions? (eg training and qualifications, roles and tasks, equipment allocations and returns etc. etc.)  

Thanks for the reply...I was hoping to manage everything related to volunteers in the same place:  Contact info, hours, availability, skills, etc.

Hi - I don't have direct exposure with Salesforce (and can't comment on it's suitability or otherwise) however Jayne Cravens maintains a very good list of Volunteer Management software that you might like to check out... it's available at: http://www.coyotecommunications.com/tech/volmanage.html 

Good luck!

Hi,

I have some knowledge of Salesforce, from the perspective of other users. My understanding is that it does take quite a bit of customization. I'd suggest going to Salesforce  and getting some help in setting it up.

As a rule of thumb, I think using your single piece of software is better than getting another piece of software to do part of the job. One way or another, you are going to have a learning curve, and better to invest it in a product that you are already using and have support for, rather than starting from ground zero again.

I do think it's a good idea to keep your volunteer management integrated with your donor management.

Best wishes,

Sasha

I can't find Salesforce in TEchsoup products.  How do you register?

Hi Rodney,

Salesforce actually has their own foundation which supports a donation of their Nonprofit Starter Pack to eligible nonprofits. Check here for more info. They have a couple of webinars, lots of online tutorials, and some examples of their nonprofit dashboard. Their full list of nonprofit resources is available here.

I've used Salesforce at previous nonprofits where I worked and we just created a customized field for volunteers under the Contacts tab so we could sort them all easily. We also had a couple of fields for what tasks and trainings they'd had and how we first met them. It was nice that we could log all of our emails back-and-forth in SF via synching with Outlook. I'm not honestly sure how to track hours in it, but I'm sure there's a way it could be done. We just didn't care to do that for some reason so we never bothered setting it up.