Managing Volunteer Data

Jane Freitas

Hello!


Currently, our volunteer data is recorded/managed via Volgistics. Throughout the year, Philanthropy has the need to reach out to our active volunteer population (i.e., newsletter, annual solicitation, etc.). We have found that it is cumbersome to update RE with active volunteer data, as volunteers are constantly joining/leaving during the year. 


How are others handling this?  Are you maintaining volunteer data in both the volunteer database, as well as RE?  Or, are you only adding volunteers to RE as they become donors?


We will not be eliminating Volgistics, so we will continue to have two separate databases in the mix for the foreseeable future.


Thank you for your kind responses, in advance.


Best,

Jane Freitas

Director of Philanthropy Services

Tidewell Hospice

Claudia Sauers

We periodically go in and pull an active volunteer list out of volgistics for particular mailings but do not add them to RE unless they donate or request not to receive mailings from us, if they call to opt out of mailings we add them as a volunteer with the appropriate solicit codes. Before we mail to our volgistics list we review for any volunteer "opt-outs".

Jane Freitas

Thanks, Claudia!  That's the position I would like to take as well...no $, not in RE.  Follow up question. If you solicit your volunteers, how do manage tracking the donors vs. non-donors from year to year in RE?  When you add a volunteer to RE as a donor, are you also capturing their Volgistics ID in the constituent record somewhere, (i.e., to facilitate a Vlookup, etc.)?  Just curious. 


Best,

Jane

Claudia Sauers

We do record the volgistics id as an attribute so we can track volunteer giving that way. We have had unique reply cards for volunteers so that we know to look up the ID when it's returned however that is reliant on the reply device being returned which doesn't always happen. We do usually do an audit at the end of the fiscal year to match back any volunteer gifts that we might have missed.

Ryan Hyde

Every month I pull a report from Volgistics that has their status and all pertinent info. The first time through, I manually mapped everyone to a RE constituent, and if they didn't exist, I created a new record. Then I imported their Volgistics status as an attribute and added their Volgistics ID number to the comments field of that attribute. 


Now every month I pull that Volgistics report and pull a query from RE that looks for anyone with that attribute. I make sure to export the Constituent ID and the Volgistics ID (from the attribute) and use VLOOKUP in Excel to map RE IDs into the Volgistics file. I also map over their last status as it exists in RE. I will then do global changes to update any status changes.


Finally, I look up unmapped individuals to see if they're in RE and add a constituent ID to the Volgistics file and import a new attribute onto those records. Anyone left over will get created via constituent import, which will also add the attribute and other fields that are required in RE.