Simple Volunteer Management

            With Apex and Visual Force allowing more and more complexity to the implementations we deliver, I tend to forget that Salesforce provides very powerful built-in functionalities.

We started a project with a nonprofit organization that relies on about 1,000 volunteers. Their challenge was summarized in 2 questions: How to collect & track new applications from volunteers? How to capture the hours spent by volunteers?

For this project we were able to combine 2 Salesforce built-in functionalities to answer these questions.

                                                                                  Web2Lead

Web2Lead provides an easy way to capture Contact information online. Once submitted on your website, the information is stored in Salesforce automatically as Lead. For this project, we renamed Lead to Volunteer Application. Now that the basic volunteer information is in Salesforce, staff can review the application. Once the volunteer has gone through the volunteer recruitment process, the application is converted to a Contact. The Lead conversion process will check for potential duplicates.

Web 2 Case

Web 2 Case is a built in functionality in Salesforce that was originally designed for allowing customers to log tech support tickets. With minimal customization we re-purposed that for allowing volunteers to log their hours from the organization’s website. Once the volunteer submits the web form, a volunteer hour record (Case renamed) is created and automatically matched to the right contact record based on the email address.

  One surprise was that we could not roll up total number of hours and the last/first volunteer date on the volunteer contact record. We had to write an apex trigger.  

  The end result is a simple yet robust implementation that meets the needs of this nonprofit and helps limit paperwork and save them time in data entry every day.