In ivolunteer.com, your participant database holds a unique record for each volunteer. You can update their contact info and run a report on their activity. (They can run a report on their own participation, too, in their My Commitments portal.) With a Premium account you also can email your database on demand. But what if you have sub-groups of volunteers with expertise and interest in certain types of tasks? Enter database groups.
Database groups let you organize, manage, and contact volunteers as a group. These easy-to-manage sections can be based on whatever criteria you need. You can have groups for different age ranges, skill sets, training, departments, and much more.
How to Manage and Create Database Groups
To manage groups, go to the Database menu and click the Groups tab. This is where you can see the groups you have already created, select a group, and see the volunteers who are in that group. Click the Add button above your groups list to add a new group. Give your group a name that will make it easy to know who is in it, depending on the needs of your organization.
Once you have named your group, you can populate it in two ways:
- Click Add Members to select individual volunteers from your database.
- Click Add Members from Event(s) to bulk add volunteers who signed up for specific events.
To remove participants, select them and then click Remove Selected Members.
How to use Database Groups
You can then use the Groups to send email to specific groups of people in your database (Premium only). In a specific Event, you can restrict signup to one or more groups based on the needs of the task. You can also create custom prompts that add volunteers to a group (automatically or based on their selection) when they sign up.
Here is a video that goes over the basics of adding and managing Database Groups.