Microsoft Dynamics CRM [RIC]: Managing Volunteers

Sumeet Singh, 20 July 2012

RIC (Relationship Information Centre): Not For Profits  

How are you currently managing your volunteers? Do you want to keep track of the volunteers who come and go? Or keep records of how much time is being donated by your volunteers?  Or keep track of what they volunteered for? If you answered yes then keep reading, as in this blog I'll be showing you how Volunteers are managed in RIC. 

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If you have read my previous blog, you'll find that managing Volunteers is very similar to how Donations are managed. Here we have the main Volunteers screen – very similar to donations.

Here we have a list of tabs on the left hand side, which includes;
•  Volunteers (Volunteers contact list)
•  Volunteer Contributions &
•  Skills (which I’ll be covering in my next blog) 

Let’s have a look at how volunteers are recorded in RIC. To enter in a volunteer record, we want to make sure we are under “Volunteer Contributions” tab. Once we are here we can start off by clicking “New”, which will open up a new window. Here we can start filling out the general details as required - under “Volunteer details” we can select the required dates and enter the amount of hours our volunteer is willing to volunteer for.

Here we have a screenshot of me entering in four hours of Cathan Cook’s time to donate on the 18^th of July 2012. 

Once we are done filling out the form, we can “Save & Close” it, this will now appear under “Volunteer Contributions” screen in detail. Here is a snapshot of what this looks like. And once Cathan has completed his time we can change the donation status to “Collected” – easy as that.

I hope this gives you a good idea of how your volunteers can be easily managed in this system. In my next blog I’ll show you how you can manage your volunteers from a skills point of view. So stay tuned!

* Image from http://www.apgcwc.org/files/QuickSiteImages/Volunteer_clip_art.gif