One of the challenges for any online service is to provide a level of customizability that meets the needs of different communities all over the United States. Many times, extensive customizability competes with scalability - and to be successful, both most work together.

As of the February 2004 release, Volunteer Solutions has come one stop closer. Volunteer Centers have been able to design custom forms to capture data important in their communities for quite awhile now. Today, for the first time, Volunteer Centers can make this custom data they collect searchable by all potential volunteers in the community. And above all, searching remains fast, accurate, and easy to setup.

As an example, New York City is composed of several different boroughs (e.g. Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island). The United Way of New York City customized the opportunity registration form in Volunteer Solutions to ask for the borough. They then made this custom question searchable. Today, their search form looks like:

The search for Boroughs is fully integrated into the NYC search page - designed, setup, and implemented by staff at the local Volunteer Center.

To make one of your opportunity custom questions searchable, the process is simple. From "Site Setup", select "Customize data collected" then "Opportunity Information". Select the property you would like to make searchable, and then follow the link titled "Make this property searchable". Next, you specify the label to use on the search form (e.g. "Borough" or "Please select the borough or boroughs in which you are interested in volunteering"). You can also choose to use a pull down widget in place of checkboxes to display the possible values. And that's it! Within a few minutes, your active opportunities will be indexed and your custom question will be integrated into your volunteer search form.

It is worth pointing out that you can also index custom questions that require a textual response. For example, if you wanted to ask your agencies to specify a few keywords by which to identify each opportunity, you could make those keywords searchable. In this case, the keywords are simply added to the text already searched by the keyword box.

No other software today makes it this easy to integrate your custom questions and data into online public search forms. With Volunteer Solutions, only your imagination limits how your volunteers can find opportunities in your community.

To find out how Volunteer Solutions can work for you, please visit http://www.volunteersolutions.org/products/ or write to sales@volunteersolutio....

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