Zero Touch Volunteer Check-ins.

Zero Touch Volunteer Check-ins.

As the shelter-in-place rules are lifted, most nonprofits are beginning to see some volunteer activity start again. But with Covid-19 still raging, all our thoughts are on how to make every process safer for everyone. With that goal in mind, we are very excited to roll out the new “zero-touch” volunteer check-in process in V4S Mobile. With just a quick scan on any iOS or Android phone/tablet, your volunteer check-in data is safely and reliably in Volunteers for Salesforce.

Background

The idea for the zero-touch solution came from requests from several of our nonprofit customers. We had detailed discussions with them on what would make sense for nonprofits and their volunteers. Everyone was concerned with the safety of multiple volunteers checking in a shared Kiosk device. As a stop-gap arrangement, we offered V4S Personal free to all our existing V4S Kiosk customers. While that worked for a few customers, a lot of our nonprofits wanted a central solution that was at their location but could still be used safely.

While we had introduced a scanning mechanism in our V4S Kiosk Events add-on, we had not done that with the volunteer check-ins. For two main reasons:

  • Most of our nonprofits had a lot of walk-in volunteers who had not previously signed up
  • With Events, there was an urgency to check-in people quickly, which wasn’t as much an issue with volunteer check-ins.

Now with COVID-19 rampant, most of our nonprofits had decided to do away with walk-in volunteering. Our discussions revealed that over 60% of nonprofits had decided that there would be no walk-in volunteers for at least the next one (1) year. Several had decided that for the next two (2) years.  And most nonprofits could not have a Volunteer Coordinator available to check-in volunteers on her device. This was especially true for our nonprofits handling pets and animal shelters, where volunteers came in from early in the morning to late at night to feed, clean, and exercise the animals. They were very clear that volunteers would need to check themselves in.

The zero-touch solution for V4S Kiosk.

With this background, we decided to add an automated scanning solution for volunteers. We added a QR Code field to Volunteers for Salesforce’s Vol Hours object. We also added a QR Code field to the Contact object in Salesforce. This way, our nonprofits have the flexibility to either have a unique QR Code based on each Volunteer’s Vol Hours record OR a unique QR Code for each Volunteer’s Contact ID.

Here is a short video that shows what the QR Code looks like on the Vol Hours record in Salesforce.

If you are setting up QR Codes by Vol Hours ID, then you’ll need to make sure that you send out an email with the QR Code it to each Volunteer for every Job/Shift that she has signed up for. You will need to send out such an email for every time that a volunteer has signed up for a Job/Shift.

Here’s a video that shows what such an Email would look like:

If you are using QR Codes on the Contact, then you could send a single email to the Volunteer with their Contact QR Code in it. They could use that same emailed QR Code for checking in every time that they came in for a signed up Job/Shift. Alternatively, you could print a badge for each volunteer with their contact QR Code on it. This way, the volunteer can scan their badge whenever she comes in for Job/Shift.

Automated Check-ins.

We suggest that you put the iOS / Android device that you are using for check-ins in the single app mode so that the device is not accidentally turned off or switched to a different app.  Within V4S Kiosk, we suggest that you select the Scanning to be in Continuous mode. Also, select whether you want the Front or Back Camera to be used. We suggest using the front camera because the volunteer would be able to see confirmation of their check-in on the screen.

Here is a video that shows how a volunteer could hold up their Shift confirmation email and get Checked-in to that Shift.

If instead, you chose to use the QR Code on the Contact ID, then potentially you could send that QR Code to the Volunteer once and she would just scan the same QR Code every time that she came in for a Job/Shift that she was signed up for that day. The V4S Kiosk app looks to check if the Contact with that QR Code has signed up for any Job/Shift on the current day and scans the Volunteer in.

If a Volunteer signs up for more than one Job/Shift per day, then she would necessarily need the QR Code related to the Job/Shift. You would not be able to scan the Volunteer with the QR Code on the Contact. Because in that case, the app would only find one of the multiple Jobs/Shifts signed up for.

As nonprofits start to open up and volunteers come back to help, we urge you all to maintain social distancing. Keep those masks on and stay safe, everyone!

The Power of the Hub!

The Power of the Hub!

It was a cold and stormy night…. Nope, not the start of yet another horror story. In fact this story is the exact opposite. At 2 AM on a chilly Bangalore night, there I was typing responses into an online spreadsheet. And feeling pretty good about it. But let me start at the beginning…..

In the summer earlier this year, TJ Warfield put up a wish-list for an Event check-in tool for nonprofits on the Power of Us Hub (The Hub, as it is sometimes called, is an online community for Salesforce.org customers, certified partners and staff). Caroline Renard, who knew of our work in the mobile app space for nonprofits, brought us into the conversation. Over a lively discussion on the Hub involving multiple people, a detailed list of functionality came up. Looking at that list, it seemed to us as something we could deliver, given that we had so much of the Salesforce and mobile infrastructure already. So we took it upon ourselves to deliver an Event add-on to our V4S Kiosk product over the next couple of months. That started a hectic round of design, development and testing internally, running into September.

Come the end of September and it was Dreamforce time. And time for virtual conversations to become real. At the Amplify breakfast, I met  with TJ and Caroline and spoke about what we had done with the wish list for Events. It was truly exciting for all of us to see how a conversation in the Hub had turned into something concrete.

Back home after Dreamforce in mid-October, we connected across the world, our team in Bangalore with TJ in San Francisco and Caroline in Seattle. And we were back in the virtual world to review the Events add-on. TJ was very happy with what we showed and graciously offered to demo and test the add-on at the Salesforce.org Open Source Community Sprint, held in Portland, OR  (#SFDOsprint) in end-Oct.

We were of course thrilled with the idea, but we were also very aware of the many things that could go wrong. TJ had seen the app near-complete, but the last 10% takes 50% of project time, right? Our team in Bangalore worked pretty much round-the-clock to put together a demo org for the Sprinters to use. We made sure there was a reasonable amount of data, a clear set of instructions and other resources for the Sprinters and a shared Google spreadsheet to collect suggestions and feedback.

The Salesforce.org Community Sprints are amazing events. Participants discuss everything from best practices to general experience to solution requirements. Working in teams, participants go all the way to produce solutions with documentation, code and data models. And everything produced by the teams goes back into the Community, making the whole ecosystem better for everyone. The Portland Sprint had that same terrific energy and enthusiasm. With 130 people at the event covering the Nonprofit and Higher Education sectors, we had a large number of people trying out the Event add-on.

With our mobile app still in beta on the iTunes Store, we did some pretty hairy back-and-forth using the iTunes TestFlight platform to get our friendly Sprinters in Portland on board. It was incredible seeing the Sprinters in Portland, our awake-at-midnight team in Bangalore and the Test flight platform (wherever that is hosted :)) all coming together for a good cause. Watching from across the world as multiple Sprinters installed V4S Kiosk via TestFlight was awe-inspiring, to say the least. And as suggestions and feedback came flying into the Feedback sheet from the Sprinters, it truly felt great to be typing in responses at 2 AM :).

Kudos to all the Sprinters who dedicated their own time to test and review the Events add-on, all for the cause of enriching the product range for Nonprofits. Thanks to these hard-working Sprinters, there’s now a terrific set of feedback and suggestions that we will add into the product. A product that nonprofits can use to raise money, manage volunteers and deliver education. Which goes to prove that “All for One and One for All’ is not just the Three Musketeers slogan but a way of life for a lot of people!