Your volunteer database may need spring cleaning, too! Keeping your database trimmed down and updated can save you time and money on volunteer management.

Prune Your Database

If you have used ivolunteer.com for any length of time, you probably have some inactive participants in your database. Clearing them out periodically can help administrators more easily manage volunteers and can prevent you from going over the limit of your ivolunteer.com plan.

database maintenance

Under Database > Participants, you can use the ACTIVE dropdown list to see participants who have not been active for a specific length of time–for example, “Not for 2 Years.” After you’ve applied the filter, you can select participants for removal manually or in bulk. To select all, click the More… button and then select Select All. You’ll be asked to confirm you want to select the whole filtered result list. Then click Remove Selected.

custom prompts
Update Your Database

This is a great time to update any information that you store about your volunteers, such as their mailing address. You can do this by creating an “Update Your Info” Event and adding custom prompts (Event Details & Actions >  Prompts) to collect the information you need. Both Standard and Premium subscriptions allow you to:

  • create custom prompts (up to 5 per signup sheet for Standard and unlimited for Premium)
  • link those prompts to database fields to keep the information updated in your general participant database

With a Premium account you can also add custom fields to your database to store special info such as t-shirt size, special volunteering preferences, etc. Then you can map custom prompts to those fields.

Once you’ve created your “Update Your Info” Event, invite your volunteers to it the same way you would invite them to a scheduling Event. Invitation emails normally are a Premium feature, but we are making them available to Standard subscriptions through the end of 2020.