Please note: This post assumes that you've already got Volunteers for Salesforce (V4S) and the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) installed, configured, and working in your Salesforce organization. For detailed instructions on how to manage that broader process, please refer to Salesforce's official documentation.
Volunteers for Salesforce (a.k.a V4S) is a fantastic module that has a whole slate of super-useful features for managing a volunteer program at a nonprofit organization. If you manage your volunteering on Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud, chances are you've clicked on the Find Volunteers button when you're managing sign-ups for a Volunteer Shift.
Chances are you might then have clicked right back out again, thinking 'this looks nice, but it doesn't allow me to search on what I really want to search'. For example, you might not be tracking Volunteer Skills, or getting your volunteers to set their Availability on their Personal Site. So, how then do you search for exactly what you want?
Customizing the 'Find Volunteers' Tool
The great news is that it is very easy to tailor this tool! You can change the set of available search filters to (nearly) any field on your Contact records. One common scenario we find is that Volunteer Managers might want to search for all Contacts affiliated with a particular Organizations. To do this, we'll need to start tinkering...
The first step is to navigate to the Contact object in the Setup menu's Object Manager, and click into the Field Sets section. Here you'll find the VolunteersFindCriteriaFS Field Set.
You can add, remove and re-order these fields! Here we can add the 'Primary Affiliation' field.
What's more, we can even change the columns that get displayed in the search results once we've asked the tool to go find us some volunteers. This is the VolunteersFindFS Field Set. Again, we can add, remove and re-order these fields. In this scenario, I'm not interested in seeing volunteering statistics, but I'd like to see the Primary Affiliation, alongside relevant Volunteer Skills and Availabilities.
And with that, we're done!
Seeing the Results
Let's say I'm a Volunteer Manager and I'm looking to staff a Shift with volunteers from the ACME Corporation. All I now need to do is navigate to the Shift record, hit the Find Volunteers button, and search on Primary Affiliation.
We've now completely redefined how we can search for eligible or useful volunteers, as well as how we see the results! It's important to note that I've just done this for the Primary Affiliation field - you can do this for other standard or custom fields you have in your Salesforce Contact database.
Happy finding!
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