How to Build a Volunteer Management App in Knack

You looking to build a volunteer management app inside of an amazing tool like Knack? Well, in this video, we’re gonna show you how to build something like that from scratch. It’s gonna be a pretty simple process, thanks to our amazing template that we have. So let’s dive right into it.

Benefits of Using a No-Code Tool

First and foremost, what are some of the benefits of the volunteer management app that we have? Using a no code tool offers small businesses like yours, especially nonprofits, a cost effective, flexible, and scalable solution that allows you to quickly deploy and maintain a customized app that enhances volunteer management and engagement, ultimately supporting their mission more effectively. With this, you can easily access data. By accessing and interacting with your secure volunteer data from anywhere with an Internet connection, it ensures you have the information you need at your fingertips.

Cloud-Based Solution Advantages

And it is a cloud based solution. So as a cloud based volunteer management solution, Knack requires no software installations and your site is always up to date with the newest version, ensuring you have the latest features and improvements. It also allows you to self manage accounts and it minimizes data errors, enabling volunteers to self manage and update their Knack, records, reducing the risk of data errors and keeping information current and accurate. There’s also a level of leverage and organizing data there.

Administrative Capabilities Overview

With some admin capabilities, administrators can monitor registrations and sign ups, setting up user groups, sending individual or mass communications, and assigning permissions to group leaders and more. Knack flexible software allows for comprehensive data management and organization. It’s also very easy to use as an administrator dashboard. It allows for streamlined coordination as well, so you can improve your volunteer program coordination through an intuitive administrator dashboard.

Streamlining Communication and Engagement

This tool helps streamline communication, track volunteer hours, and manage schedules effortlessly, empowering administrators to optimize every aspect of volunteer program management with ease. You can also quickly communicate with your database of contacts. Personalizing and segmenting your communications by individual volunteer or volunteer group, you can use Knack communication features to remind, engage, and thank volunteers, fostering a sense of belonging and appreciation within your organization. There’s also a great spot for list of upcoming events.

Managing Upcoming Events

You can easily manage and display a list of upcoming events, helping volunteers stay informed and engaged with your organization’s activities. By utilizing Knack powerful features, your nonprofit can enhance its volunteer management capabilities, improve data accuracy, streamline administration, and foster a stronger sense of community among your volunteers. So in this video, we’re gonna walk through the key features and functionalities of the app, helping you manage your volunteers and events efficiently. So simply go into your Knack account, and let’s start from a sample app.

Creating Your Volunteer Management App

And we’re gonna look for volunteer management. Alright. Let’s press create app. And then once we’re logged into this application, as an admin, you have full rights to add, edit, and view all data related to your organization’s events and volunteers.

Navigating Event Management Features

So you’ll see right here, we have a few tables like events, event jobs, and event job sign ups. You would navigate to the events section to create, edit, and view event details. So you can change the different fields here with any of these options over here, but it does come default with some example records as well. For example, there’s an annual turkey trot five k.

Volunteer Information Management

You can change that name, change the event date and time. There are some formulas here that are related to other ones, so you can’t, like, edit that, but it’s pretty simple to edit anything once you get a handle on the product. And if you go to the volunteer section right here, you can actually handle the information for those volunteers, including adding new volunteers by pressing add record and updating existing records with all of their different information, like name, email, address, phone number, and anything else you’d wanna add. So each volunteer will have their unique login credentials.

Volunteer Access and Job Assignments

As you can see here, there’s Knack a password here for them, actually. And volunteers can log in to view their specific job assignments, register for event jobs, and update their account settings. So once logged in, we’re gonna go to the live app as an example. You’ll see that people can see their assigned jobs and the master event calendar, which shows all events they are part of.

Event Details and Job Registration

So this is the events right here. So click on that, and this is what you’re gonna see when you log in. But you can view the event details and jobs, the specific aspect of it. You can, if you’re an admin, add event jobs, but as volunteers, you just basically see this.

Job Registration and Volunteer Tracking

It says whether all the jobs are filled or not, which is very important. It links out to the job registration. And with this, the app uses formulas to count registered volunteers for each job and track many vacancies. That’s how this yes or no all jobs filled item was made.

So total jobs, volunteers registered, needed zero. So if it was it’s one that’s greater than zero. That’s why it says no. And since it’s zero, that’s why it says yes.

Workflow Automation in Event Management

And with this template, workflows automatically hide the registration form once a job is filled, which is really great. So as an admin as well, you can also see all the events on the calendar. But it’s really great the fact that, like, you just can’t overbook people in this system. It’s really awesome.

Admin Calendar Overview

It’s one of the great showcases of the powers of workflows we have. And on this event calendar, as an admin, you can view all events on the calendar. This provides a comprehensive view of all of these different scheduled activities. So that would be here.

So you can see the events on twelve sixteen over here. So if I just go Knack, you can see there’s a food and clothing drive right here, and we can see more. The volunteers can log in and see only their assigned events. So as an admin, I can see everything, but if I’m not a part of this, I wouldn’t be able to see the different events that aren’t there.

Automating Volunteer Communications

So there are conditional rules in place to update the job vacancy field automatically when the registration count reaches a specific threshold, as kind of mentioned earlier. And there are also email alerts. With scheduled tasks, this pro feature allows you to schedule tasks such as sending email alerts to volunteers before their scheduled event. You can set up email reminders to ensure volunteers are informed and prepared for their assignments.

Example of Volunteer Automations

So let’s go over some example volunteer automations in action. I’m gonna just talk about this as an example for a step by step process. So say a volunteer registers for an event through the Knack app, then the system could automatically send a confirmation email and update the job vacancy count. So they could go from four open jobs to three, for example.

The event details are synced to the volunteer’s Google Calendar and then a reminder SMS is sent to the volunteer a day before the event via Twilio. After that event, an automated survey is sent to the volunteer via SurveyMonkey to gather feedback. The volunteer’s hours are logged and a summary report is generated and sent to the admin. Then volunteer data is continuously synced with Salesforce, ensuring all interactions and updates are captured.

Integrating Tools for Enhanced Management

Monthly volunteer activity reports are automatically generated using Tableau and emailed to the management team. By integrating these automations and tools, the Knack Volunteer Management app can streamline operations, enhance volunteer management, and provide valuable insights to help nonprofits manage their volunteer programs more effectively. Leveraging Knack with an integration to an existing nonprofit volunteer management solution like Blackbaud can offer several significant benefits.

Custom Applications with Knack and Blackbaud

Allows nonprofits to build custom applications that can be tailored to their specific needs, complementing Blackbaud’s robust features with additional customization options. Use Knack to automate routine tasks such as sending reminders, logging volunteer hours, and generating reports, freeing up staff time to focus on more strategic activities. Implement advanced workflows that trigger specific actions in Blackbaud based on activities or changes in Knack, optimizing operational efficiency. You can also utilize Knack to build customized reports and dashboards that provide deeper insights into volunteer activities, engagement levels, and program outcomes, complementing Blackbaud’s reporting capabilities.

Real-World Example of Integration

Building and maintaining custom features in Knack is often more cost effective than developing entirely new systems or extensively customizing existing ones. Here’s a real work example with Blackbaud. Imagine a nonprofit using Blackbaud for its core volunteer management, but wanting to add a custom volunteer portal with specific features not available in Blackbaud. By integrating Knack, they can create a custom volunteer portal.

Volunteer Portal Features and Benefits

Volunteers can log in, view their assignments, register for events, and update their profiles. They can automatically send confirmation emails and event reminders via integrated email services. They can ensure that all volunteer data entered into the custom portal is synced with Blackbaud, keeping records consistent and up to date. They can use Knack to create detail and customized reports on volunteer engagement and activity that pull data from both systems.

Conclusion and Next Steps

By leveraging Knack with Blackbaud, nonprofits can enhance their volunteer management capabilities, streamline operations, and provide a better experience for their volunteers while ensuring data integrity and maximizing their technology investments. So I hope you enjoyed learning a little bit more about what Knack can do for you. If you are in this spot where you kind of need a custom solution, you want to build something out, Knack is going to be the option for you and it can be done at a very solid price. So with that being said, thank you so much for watching this video and we’ll see you in the next one.