Although many organizations already use CiviCRM to manage volunteer programs, a more streamlined and integrated approach to volunteer management and tracking functionality has been high on many peoples' wish list for several years. Thanks to generous financial support from the Kahle/Austin Foundation, Friends of Georgia State Parks, Confluence, and JMA Consulting - along with work above and beyond the call of duty by Frank Gomez, Michael Darabeygi, Yashodha Chaku and Coleman Watts - phase 1 of the new CiviVolunteer extension will be released as part of the upcoming 4.4 version of CiviCRM.
The features for this release focus on volunteering at events, but the design creates a foundation for adding support for volunteering in a wide variety of situations. I've been doing some testing and experimenting with the extension pre-release, and I'm pretty excited by what I"m seeing. Here's a quick 'tour' of the features …
What Volunteers are Needed and When
After installing the extension using the automated installer from Manage Extensions, you'll see a new Volunteers tab for each event (Manage Events > Configure). Check the 'Enable Volunteer Management' box to get started.
You can then build a list of volunteer shifts by clicking 'Define Volunteer Needs'. Shifts consists of a volunteer role (e.g. Usher, Box Office, etc.) plus a date and time period. For each shift you can specify the number of volunteers required.
Self-service Volunteer Signup
Once you've defined your volunteer needs, you can decide to include a volunteer signup form as part of your public event. Volunteers can select a shift, or let you know that they are available for any shift.
Manage Volunteer Assignments
The 'Manage Assignments' widget allows you to assign flexible volunteers to shifts, add new volunteers and change shift assignments - all in an easy to use drag-and-drop panel.
Log and Report on Volunteer Hours
Finally, staff can log actual hours worked by each volunteer on a regular basis if needed for funder reports, and use the new Volunteer Activity Report to get stats on volunteering.
CiviVolunteer 1.0 will be released at the same time as CiviCRM 4.4 - currently scheduled for early October. Going forward there are some great ideas on the drawing board for phase 2, including specification of qualifications and skill-matching, public recognition, and self-service logging of volunteer hours.
If your organization has invested in a CiviCRM installation, and you foresee a need for CiviVolunteer, consider donating to the ongoing development of CiviVolunteer through the Make it Happen program. Developers within organizations that would like to use CiviVolunteer are more than welcome to participate in the development and testing effort. At this point in the phase 1 cycle we particularly need folks who can work on developing unit and web tests, as well as folks interested in creating user documentation. Contact me (dave at civicrm dot org), and / or signup to attend the upcoming code sprint in Washington DC (September 4-5) if you're interested in helping out.
If your organization depends on volunteers to drive your mission - I hope you'll get involved and help ensure the success of this project.
Comments
Sounds great and I'd love to test it in 4.4 alpha/beta - where can I find the extension?
We'd love you to test it too! We'll try to get a preview release out during the sprint this week.
... and you can't wait until the sprint, you can check it out here: http://github.com/civicrm/civivolunteer.
Any news on this? I'd love to test, but am not familiar with git.
... which you can download and install. FYI you'll need to test on a 4.4 beta release test site, so you might want to upgrade a test copy of your site soon to 'get ready' (if you haven't already).