Thanks to tremendous support from the CiviCRM community, development of CiviVolunteer 2.0 is well underway, with a beta slated to be released in time for the CiviCRM User Summit in September. Read on for a preview of what CiviVolunteer 2.0 will add to your volunteer management practice.

Volunteer Recruitment

At the heart of any volunteer program is recruitment. CiviVolunteer 2.0 makes it easy for people to identify volunteer opportunities that fit their skills and interests. Signing up is easier than ever.

Searchable List of Volunteer Opportunities

Though CiviVolunteer allows organizations to recruit volunteers for a myriad of projects, it doesn’t offer a central listing of all the available opportunities. CiviVolunteer 2.0 changes that. Volunteers are empowered to choose the opportunities that most interest them. To start, volunteers can search by date, type of activity, and beneficiary.

Improved Sign Up Experience

If volunteers can browse multiple opportunities at once, why not let them sign up for multiple opportunities at once? CiviVolunteer 2.0 introduces a shopping-cart approach to volunteer registration. Volunteers can sign up for multiple shifts in a project—or even across projects.

Volunteer Management

New features will allow organizations to easily create volunteer opportunities, manage additional roles, improve communication with volunteers, and better measure outcomes.

Fewer Forms, Easier Administration

New in CiviVolunteer 2.0 is a dedicated volunteer project management interface, independent of CiviEvent. For folks whose volunteer operations don’t center around events, the days of creating placeholders to serve as containers for volunteer opportunities are over. Love the volunteer/event integration? Don’t worry—nothing you’ve come to rely on is going away.

More Roles for Volunteer Projects

CiviVolunteer allows an organization to assign different roles to volunteers, but what about contacts inside the organization? CiviVolunteer 2.0 introduces new relationships to manage non-volunteer roles in a project. The release will ship with Project Owner, Volunteer Manager, and Beneficiary, but organizations will be able to create arbitrary relationship types. The extension will use the Volunteer Manager relationship to decide whom to notify about project happenings (e.g., your project starts in a week, and you still have unfilled positions). How will your organization use relationships?

Improved Communication with Volunteers

From sending confirmations to new recruits, to automatically notifying volunteers of schedule changes, to sending reminders leading up to your project, CiviVolunteer 2.0 helps organizations build relationships with their volunteers.

Associate Efforts with Outcomes

An integration with CiviCampaign enables CiviVolunteer 2.0 to provide detailed reporting across volunteer projects. Take for example an organization planning its 10-year anniversary gala. Organizing such a gala may require multiple volunteer projects: weeks before the event, volunteers may join staff for an envelope stuffing party; on the day of the event, volunteers may be used to staff the venue; etc. Using CiviVolunteer and CiviCampaign together allows the gala organizers to associate all the efforts (event invitations sent via post, fundraising appeals sent electronically, volunteer hours, etc.) with their outcomes (event registrations, donations, pledges, etc.).

Stay Tuned

In the following weeks, we will be taking a closer look at each of the features outlined above. Stay tuned to this blog!