5 Salesforce Automation Tips to Boost Volunteer Engagement

Volunteers provide invaluable support to nonprofit organizations. They offer on-the-ground assistance that directly helps beneficiaries and furthers your mission. Effectively managing your nonprofit’s volunteers is key to recruiting, engaging, and leveraging this key sector of supporters.

However, processes like maintaining regular communications with volunteers, assigning roles, and creating shift schedules can be challenging without the right tools. This guide will explore how your nonprofit can leverage Salesforce to save time and increase volunteer engagement. Let’s begin.

How Can Nonprofits Use Salesforce for Volunteer Management?

Salesforce offers two systems specifically designed to manage nonprofit operations: Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) and Nonprofit Cloud (NPC). These solutions each offer tools to help nonprofits manage their daily tasks, such as donation tracking and donor management. However, they may not have all the capabilities organizations need to effectively manage volunteers.

To fill in these gaps, consider leveraging an integrated volunteer management solution like Golden. The app can:

• Help your team manage schedules.
• Automate communications to help your nonprofits build relationships with supporters.
• Update records and reports within Salesforce and Golden, ensuring volunteer data is accurate and consolidated.
• The ability to automatically track volunteer signups, attendance at volunteer events, hours spent volunteering, and more.
• Offer visualizations of your volunteer data, making it easy to track trends.
• Promote safety and compliance with global regulations with automatic background checks, digital waivers, and more.

Used properly, these features can improve volunteer engagement and retention. For example, your nonprofit can frequently check volunteers’ hours and balance their workloads accordingly to prevent volunteer burnout.

How Can a Salesforce Integration Save Time and Boost Engagement?

One major benefit of using an integrated volunteer management tool with your Salesforce CRM is efficiency. Combined, these tools consolidate your data and streamline the tasks your staff members would otherwise manage manually through automation.

360MatchPro explains, “automation is when software automatically executes tasks once certain criteria are met.”—as an example, a potential volunteer completes their application and automatically receives a confirmation email.

Here are five tips for using automation to enhance volunteer program management:

1. Optimizing Current Business Processes

First, audit your nonprofit’s current workflows to determine whether they are the most efficient, streamlined versions possible. In most cases, organizations uncover clunky processes that should be reconfigured or removed.

If your nonprofit doesn’t currently use NPC or Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) and will be implementing Salesforce, this is an ideal time to determine the most optimal workflows for your organization’s needs. Work with your implementation partner to ensure your technology enables, rather than limits, your efficiency. Your partner can also help you set up your integrated volunteer app and build out time-saving automated workflows.

Remember that you can also adjust your approach at any time after implementation. For instance, update processes in response to growth, new goals, and evolving needs.

2. Streamlining Recruitment

Recruitment is often the most time-consuming, costly part of growing your supporter base. While volunteer recruitment strategies like writing specific, compelling role descriptions and paring down your application form can be beneficial, there are other ways to maximize your resources during recruitment.

Automation saves time during recruitment and makes outreach more targeted and effective. Using Salesforce and your volunteer management solution, your nonprofit can:

• Create templates: These templates can be for long-term volunteer engagements or one-time opportunities, but the goal is to collect information about volunteers that can be used to drive them to take action. Standard templates save staff time and can clarify first-time volunteers’ expectations, leading to better experiences. For example, your staff can copy the templates to easily create standardized, recurring events.
• Automatically collect background checks: This is critical to maintaining compliance and keeping volunteer opportunities safe. However, it can be a time-consuming roadblock in the volunteer recruitment process. Use a system that will automatically start this process when potential volunteers apply.
• Share recruitment event notifications: Using preset or customized triggers, send invitations to informational volunteer recruitment events based on supporters’ interactions with your nonprofit. Leverage data stored in your Salesforce CRM about supporters’ engagement history to determine which groups are most likely to attend.

This approach helps your nonprofit achieve personalized volunteer outreach at scale. As a result, you’ll likely see better results from your recruitment efforts without needing to invest more time or resources.

3. Automating Routine Communications

Regular, personalized communication is essential to steward and retain any supporter. While important, sharing these communications can quickly become a full-time job without automation.

Again, your nonprofit can use preset automation in its volunteer management tool or create custom triggers and sequences. Automating the following routine messages will foster stronger relationships with volunteers, boosting program engagement and retention:

• Copies of applications and confirmation emails that are sent when prospective volunteers submit the application.
• Welcome series with educational materials, next steps, and a link to the onboarding process that launches once a new volunteer is accepted.
• Shift notifications and confirmations that trigger when a volunteer is assigned to or registers for a shift.
• Shift reminders that launch a set amount of time before the volunteer’s shift (e.g., 24 hours).
• Post-shift follow-up messages like surveys or generic thank-you messages that trigger a set amount of time after a shift (e.g., one hour later) to recognize volunteers’ efforts.

These messages are important, but manually sending each one would outweigh the benefits. Automatically sending these communications takes the burden off your staff while still cultivating relationships with volunteers. 

4. Assigning Roles

Identifying the best role for each volunteer ensures that they have a positive, safe experience with your nonprofit and choose to return in the future. Using Salesforce with your volunteer management solution, you can automatically guide volunteers to the roles that best fit their needs, interests, and abilities, motivating them to engage regularly. 

Let’s look at an example. The Atlanta Habitat for Humanity requires all volunteers to be 16 years or older. To avoid receiving applications from those younger than 16, the organization can set up an automation rule that will remove any applicants who enter an age less than 16 from the process and provide them with a message explaining why. Additionally, tools like Golden will automatically request parental consent for volunteers who are underage.

Habitat for Humanity could take a similar approach to qualify volunteers for roles that require certain skills or knowledge. For instance, they may be looking for professional contractors to assist with their build projects. To automate screening, the organization can create an eligibility quiz to determine whether the applicant has the right skills, interests, availability, and other qualifications for the role.

5. Personalizing Thank You Messages

Research indicates that supporters stop engaging with nonprofits because they lack acknowledgment for their contributions. However, sharing a simple, heartfelt thank-you message can reinvigorate supporters and make them feel valued.

While it’s best to prioritize authenticity over speed when thanking volunteers, automated processes can help you achieve both. Configure templates that will be automatically sent after each volunteer shift, and fill in personalized details like:

• The volunteer’s name
• The date they assisted your nonprofit
• The specific tasks they completed
• The impact of their day of service
• A genuine expression of gratitude for their support
• A sign-off from a staff member the volunteer knows

Golden’s volunteer management solution can help you achieve this and can even share communications via the volunteer’s preferred communication channel. Leverage the data collected by Golden to flesh out your thank-you message templates.

To encourage further engagement, provide recommendations of other upcoming opportunities they might enjoy, events to attend, or new projects that align with their interests.

Salesforce is a powerful tool that can revolutionize nonprofit operations. Volunteer management apps with custom workflow automation will save staff time while engaging volunteers more deeply. 

To maximize this solution’s capabilities, consider working with a Salesforce partner. These highly qualified experts specialize in Salesforce and can help your organization optimize its business processes and workflows to enhance efficiency and outcomes.

About Fionta

About the Author

Karin Tracy, VP of Marketing at Fíonta

Karin Tracy is a seasoned designer and marketer with a passion for serving nonprofit organizations and being a small part of bettering the world. She is a certified Pardot Consultant and Marketing Cloud Email Specialist, a fan of automation and reporting, a lover of animals, and devourer of popcorn.

At Fíonta, Karin drives marketing efforts for all internal and external projects. Her direct service work is focused primarily on marketing strategy and automation for Fíonta’s MCAE (Pardot) clients.