In my last blog post I promised I'd share more about CiviVolunteer 2.0's new features as they come together. We've finished our first round of development on what I've been calling the volunteer opportunity shopping cart, and I'm excited to share it with you.
While the 1.x branch of CiviVolunteer focused primarily on administrative tools for managing volunteers, with 2.0 we've brought our focus to improving the volunteer experience. We've built a new interface which helps potential volunteers find opportunities in your organization and makes it easy for them to sign up for multiple opportunities in one go. Organizations brokering volunteers to chapters or to partner organizations will find the beneficiary and proximity search functionality particularly interesting.
The screencast above will tell you much more than I could do with words. Please check it out and share your reactions and questions in the comments section below.
Comments
The opportunities / signup functionality looks quite good and really useful. Thanks for sharing the 'sneak peek'!
Frank, this looks amazing! Is there a shortcode for displaying this view on the frontend of WordPress websites?
Thanks, Nate! No, there is no such shortcode. The intention is that this interface will be public. We are still working on some issues around that but are quite close.
Thanks Frank, this looks great.
We desperately need to have a description for each volunteer opportunity though. The combination of Event/Project, Role, and Time isn't enough. In our use case, we will have many identical Project/Role/Time combinations where the actual thing they are volunteering for is unique, and of interest to the volunteers. In one example, we need volunteer projectionists for scientific conference sessions. The volunteers will select which session to volunteer for based on the content of the session; often one they will be going to anyway. This year we had almost 80 sessions over 3 days and there is a need for them to know which is which, by session name.
Ask Toby. ;)
Hi, Rob,
The interface in the demo has descriptions for each role as well as each project. Is that not enough? What I think I hear you saying is that you need another level of granularity for descriptions, down to the Need?
That's not presently in our roadmap. Technically, it's not a huge lift, but I'm not sure where such a field would fit in the existing interfaces. Feel free to share any ideas you have around that.
On a related note, I've been meaing to have a look at potentially adding custom field support to CiviVolunteer entities, but I need to do a little discovery there before I can say much more about that.
This looks wonderful and just what we are looking for to help volunteers find areas to participate. When do you anticipate it being release to extensions?
Thanks, Julie. We are having a few clients put it through its paces right now. This process has been useful for checking some of our assumptions regarding how the software will be used as well as to find and address issues in a controlled environment. We want to get these issues sorted out before a public release since there are a lot of people using CiviVolunteer who have no contact with Ginkgo Street Labs.
If you're technical and have a testing site where you can safely install software-in-progress, you can get the code from GitHub and try it out (and hopefully report whatever bugs you find!).
This looks great! An easy way for volunteers to find opportunities to fit there schedules and skills.
Congrats Frank on the excellent work!