Wednesday, November 30, 2011

A Few Tips to Optimize your "Searchability" on HandsOn Connect

Would you like to help volunteers find your organization on HandsOn Connect, HandsOn's new volunteer database? We have a few helpful tips that will ensure volunteers can find you based on interest and impact area.

1. Select Your Impact Area and Population Served. If you are the primary contact on our account, login and take a look at the My Organization tab. You will see drop down menus for both impact area and population served. If your organization would like to select more than one item from these lists, send what you would like selected to Melissa. Unfortunately, partners can only select one of each at this time. We hope that will change in the future.

2. Beef up your Organization Description. On top of ensuring volunteers know the population you serve and the impact area you work in, you can also add key works to your organizational description. This section is again under the My Organization tab. It is labeled Mission Statement in the Partner Portal but it is not labeled on the public site so you can put anything you want in there. Include common search words like literacy, environment, at risk youth, etc. This will help volunteers find you when they conduct basic searches on the database.

3. Make sure you have an active opportunity available for sign up. Like many of us, volunteers hate running into a dead end! Imagine finding an organization that fits your values and interests only for it to appear that the organization isn't currently seeking volunteers. Even if you do not have a specific need available, always have at least one general opportunity active. Remember the goal is to make it easy for volunteers to engage with you. Also, organizations who are not active on the database are sometimes hidden from searches. Don't miss out on meeting a great volunteer!

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