The best way to send communication to new folks is to email all people that are pending status. Whenever a new volunteer is added they are put on pending status until you go into VOLUNTEERS - APPROVE VOLUNTEERS and approve them. You can easily just go to that screen and select "Email this List" before approving them.
The system does track start date, so you could go to find volunteer and hit search to show everyone and export to excel to see start dates. Problem there is you would not be able to easily send the email through Manager.
On the last question - you can't tell when they last visitited the site but the Record Dtime does tell you the last time they updated their record. The GMT is Greenwich Mean Time - a geeky computer thing. I believe it is 5 hours ahead of EST.
Ok, thanks these are great ideas Tim. Another quick question, can I tell if a volunteer has visited the site ? I downloaded the report and it has Record Dtime but I assume that was the date/time that I created the record although the times are off. Are they in GMT or something?
Mike S (form our staff) or another user may jump in with more ideas, but a couple for you:
1. The system sends an automated email to new users. You can customize the copy in that automated email to anything you like.
2. Are you set up so that new users need to be approved by software coordiantor? If so, then you could use that (the not approved yet list) as your list.
3. You could use one of the "user fields" as a "start month" field (and fill it with 1006, 1106, 1206, 0107 or the like) and send one welcome new user email per month to those from that month.
Hi, is there a way to find volunteers by Start Date? I like to send welcome emails to new volunteers but I can't differentiate between them on the search menu. Am I doing something wrong?