Coding volunteer committee members

Melissa Rabinow

I'm curious about those who use the Volunteer Module to code volunteer committees - can I just use the Volunteer Types or do I have to create Job Assignments? I'm looking to change our coding for groups like Trustees, Board Committees, Alumni and Parent Association volunteers. We currently code them in attributes which is very messy and not easy to pull lists by year. Thanks!

Annie Charlot

@Melissa Rabinow - I'm about to start working on the same thing. My org also tracks all of their board/committees/etc. in attributes, then switched to tracking them in relationships. I recommended the volunteer module because I've used it at another org and think it's a cleaner way to track these things.

The previous org didn't use job assignments but I'm also wondering if I should use type as a broad field and use jobs to track the actual assignments. What did you/your org end up doing? Was it really time consuming setting everything up? I'll be backtracking a lot of data so I know it's going to take a decent amount of time. If you have any tips from your experience I'd appreciate any you can share. Thanks!

Lucy Ruiz

@Melissa Rabinow This will really come down to how you will report on this data. If you have a third party application that tracks the details you may not need to replicate all this data into RE. If you do want to bring over some higher level data, relationships work well because they can allow you to have multiple start and end dates without having to create all the various elements of a volunteer record in RE. You might even be able to just use Current and Former Volunteer. Let's your reports and analytics be your guide.