Add ability to name Volunteer Opportunities

[CoreyBurger]

When adding shifts to an event, you cannot name those shifts. You might have several different locations or pieces of an event with the same Role but they need to be kept separate

Our use case: We have a multi-day event (Bike to Work Week) that has events (celebration stations) in the morning and afternoon. There can be dozens of these celebration stations, so separate events don't make sense.

[ginkgomzd]

Hi Corey, I'm just pasting my comment on #526 again here. ;-)

We have something in the works for this. There are custom implementations using the functionality already. There remains significant work to make it suitable for general release. Would you be interested in discussing funding?

Cheers

[joemcl]

@ginkgomzd can you maybe add the functionality to a branch and we can test it out? Or add those to a public demo site? How much 'significant work' is involved?

[ginkgomzd]

I'm not really talking about "adding names to opportunities". It would not be a big deal to add a field to Needs, but I consider it to be beating a dead horse.

What we have worked on is a whole new entity called "Appeals" under the hood, but has ended up being labelled "Opportunities" in the UI. Volunteer started off as a scheduling tool. It soon became clear that it needed to do a lot more than that. For a long time, everything was working around the Shift/Need entity, which were really shadow activities. The biggest outcomes are that the opportunity search sucks, and Projects have expanded in an un-planned way to deal with the shortcomings of Shifts.

I like to think of Appeals as a poster on a bulletin board. They are designed to model content and therefore do a much better job of appealing to volunteers to participate. You can check out the first implementation at https://volunteer.leadercenter.org There is a second phase of development underway in partnership with the LA LGBT Center. The code can not be released because a) it is not ready for general use and b) the sunk investment has not been recovered.

I would like to do a M-I-H fundraiser, but there are several things I need to get out of the way before I can seriously plan one. I hope we can do it in January. I am looking for partners for the initiative.

Cheers

[CoreyBurger]

Given I use the volunteer stuff for a single-org, the rework to make it more a "volunteer opportunities warehouse" is less exciting for me. For me, the need comes down to being to differentiate different jobs in a fairly simple way

[ginkgomzd]

@CoreyBurger, what about Roles do you feel does not meet this need?

[CoreyBurger]

We would end up with hundreds of roles. Here is our most common use case:

We run Bike to Work Week and other events. We need three types of volunteers: setup, running the booth and tear down.

During BTWW, we have dozens of celebration stations scattered throughout the region. These stations shift location and for ease, we like to schedule volunteers across the whole week. In order to use Roles, we would have to create and delete dozens of these each year.

Our organization also does a lot of other things, so roles is going to quickly fill up with non-event volunteer things too.

I looked at Roles, but no, the massive time impact and the headache of shoehorning our use case into the existing structure doesn't make sense

[ginkgomzd]

@CoreyBurger, Gotcha. I'm not sure why you are understanding the new Opportunities Search as a "warehouse". But you do make me think that a good scope for the Make It Happen fundraising is to ensure that the new search works well for organizations that only post opportunities for themselves. I think these would be pretty easy changes to accomplish: adding configurations and hiding the beneficiary of opportunities.

I think for a stop-gap, you could customize the display of the Project Title in the existing opportunity search. As it is, project is definitely the rich-container one should reach for.

[CoreyBurger]

Thanks, that is good to know. I can speak to my board about a Make It Happen request