Creating a Virtual Volunteer Opportunity in HandsOn Connect's Sharing Portal

The first thing to consider when creating a Virtual Volunteer Opportunity is how you want to manage it.

  • Do you just want to distribute information about what to do and how to get involved?
  • Do you want to schedule the volunteer to perform or complete the virtual opportunity by a specific date?
  • Do you want to track whether or not the volunteer actually completed the virtual opportunity?
  • Do you want to award hours of service to the volunteer for their or your own metrics?
  • Do you want volunteers to be able to search for Virtual Opportunities on your site, separate from location-base opportunities?

HandsOn Connect offers a lot of flexibility in how you can manage Virtual Volunteer Opportunities.  In this series of articles - we'll start with the most basic way to do this, and offer ideas about how to more deeply manage and track virtual volunteerism, if that's your objective.

Let's start with a basic way to list a virtual volunteer opportunity.  For this example we'll choose to create an opportunity where volunteers are asked to knit blankets at home, and send them to our Volunteer Center, where we'll then donate them to local shelters.

Create a Volunteer Opportunity as Individually Scheduled - Express Interest Only

Individually Scheduled, Express Interest Only opportunities are ideal for Virtual Opportunities as they do not require a location for the opportunity.

Give the opportunity a name that clearly identifies it, and indicates its a Virtual Opportunity.

In the opportunity description, give details on what the volunteer needs to do to complete the project.

For detailed instructions, it might be best to include a downloadable document that includes information on how to complete the project, where to mail or deliver it, and any other relevant details:

Notes

How to attach a downloadable file to an opportunity description

In the sharing portal there isn't a way for you to upload documents directly so that you can put a link to a document in the opportunity description.  Here's a few options:

1) Rather than attaching a document, provide all the instructions and details in the Opportunity Description itself.

2) If the document already exists on another website, just make a link that goes to where that document can be found.
You can share documents through a number of cloud services such as DropBox, Microsoft's OneDrive, Google Docs and others.  Just store your document there, get a link to the shared document, and link to the document in the opportunity description.

3) If you don't have access to a document sharing site, contact your system administrator and ask them to store the document for you in Salesforce, and send you the URL to access the document.