Ginkgo Street Labs is proud to announce the availability of CiviVolunteer 2.0 to the CiviCRM community. CiviVolunteer adds volunteer management to the donor tracking, membership management and event registration capabilities of CiviCRM, the Bossie award-winning nonprofit constituent relationship management (CRM) system. This latest release of CiviVolunteer introduces major improvements in functionality over the previous version, released in August 2015.
Here are some of the things you'll find in CiviVolunteer 2.0:
- CiviVolunteer now has its own item on the CiviCRM menu. All of the configurations are at your fingertips.
- It is no longer necessary to house volunteer opportunities within an event. This greatly streamlines the volunteer management process for projects which are not related to an event. Furthermore, this change allows you to post an opportunity for a need that doesn’t have a specific schedule, such as a graphic designer or bookkeeper. If your organization uses volunteers at events, you're still able to enable volunteer management when creating an event.
- Volunteer management is now multi-tiered, enabling outside organizations to create volunteer opportunities. In addition to specifying a contact as the Beneficiary of a volunteer project, projects can be assigned an Owner and a Volunteer Manager. These roles are useful for specifying permissions, providing volunteers with a contact, and managing system notifications.
- Visitors to your CiviCRM web site can now search for volunteer opportunities by date, by role or by beneficiary. There's also the option to search for volunteer opportunities within a specified distance of a location.
- Volunteers can sign up for multiple volunteer opportunities at once using a "shopping cart."
- A volunteer using the online sign-up can provide information about additional volunteers he or she is bringing.
- Organizers can produce a mobile-friendly roster of signed-up volunteers to help with day-of operations.
- Volunteer projects can be associated with a Campaign. Volunteer-related activities created for a contact inherit the project's campaign setting, and Campaigns can be used for reporting across volunteer projects.
CiviVolunteer can be downloaded from the CiviCRM extensions directory or installed from within CiviCRM from the Administer menu, under System Settings > Manage Extensions (some systems may have it under Custom Data and Screens > Manage Extensions). You'll also need to install version 1.0.1 or later of Angular Profiles – a utility extension which helps the Angular and Backbone JavaScript frameworks play nicely together – in order for CiviVolunteer to function properly. If you're currently using CiviVolunteer, the new version should be available as an update on the Manage Extensions page. Right now, CiviVolunteer 2.0 is available for CiviCRM 4.6. We’re working on a couple of 4.7-compatibility issues; a release for 4.7 will be up shortly.
Ginkgo Street Labs would like to thank the members of the CiviCRM community who made contributions to the project, especially CiviCRM LLC, the Hunger Free America, Friends of Georgia State Parks & Historic Sites, the SIFMA Foundation, Horn Farm Center for Agricultural Education, and Barbara Ericksson. This project is fortunate to have more supporters than can be listed here; a complete list of contributors is available on the extension microsite.
As part of the numerous events planned for CiviDay, we did an online tour of CiviVolunteer 2.0. If you couldn't make it, a recording is available.
We encourage members of the CiviCRM community to try the new version and look forward to hearing your feedback!
