Map a volunteer interest form

Overview

This article provides instructions for creating a volunteer interest form in LGL Forms that allows people to submit their volunteering areas of interest for your organization (as opposed to a volunteer hours form where volunteers track or submit their volunteering time).

If you want to keep track of where your volunteers would prefer to spend time volunteering for your organization, we recommend setting up and using custom constituent categories in LGL prior to building your form.

It is fairly simple then to create and map a general volunteer interest form where your volunteers can submit what category of volunteering work they’re interested in doing.

Set up a custom constituent category to track volunteer interests

You can start by creating a custom constituent category for "Volunteer Interests" or similar and then adding the relevant values (volunteer interests) they can be coded to (for example: Front office, Events, Tours, Landscaping, etc.). When creating the constituent category, make it a multi-select field. Then add the values (areas of interest) you plan to make available in your form.

Your category would look something like the following:

You can find complete instructions for how to create custom constituent categories in this help article.

Build the form

You can find general instructions for how to build a form here.

For this form, you would typically use the following fields:

Name
Email address (and any other contact information fields)
Area of volunteering interest
Other data you want to capture such as availability and preferred day/s to volunteer

Here’s how your form might look when it’s built and published:

Map the fields

Your next step is to map the fields in your form to the LGL fields you want the data to flow into.

To map the “Volunteer Interests” field, add a record type for "Constituent Categories" to your form’s mapping page:

Map the “Area of volunteering interest” form field to the “Volunteer Interests” constituent category, as shown here:

Map the values within the constituent category field mapping

Map the values by clicking the blue compass icon and mapping each value in the LGL constituent category:

You can find complete instructions for mapping values here.

Save your changes

Be sure you save all changes to your field mappings. Then click the "Save & Finish" button on your mapping page. If you navigate away from this page before taking this step, your changes won’t be saved.

Now test your form to make sure the data is coming in as you expect.

Whenever your volunteers submit their volunteer interests through this form, the data will be saved into their constituent record. You'll be able to search by the volunteer interest to see which constituents expressed an interest for a specific volunteer opportunity.