Your Settings menu includes a Community Impact option.
The information entered in the Community Impact settings area is used in developing charts for your Volunteer Impact Pages (VIPs).
The Community Impact tab has fields for the following information:
Community Impact Goals
Use this area to specify your organization's goals for volunteer matches and volunteer hours within a specified date range.
- Date Range - Specify the date range by which to measure your goals.
- Goal: Volunteer Matches - Type the number of volunteer matches for the date range.
- Goal: Volunteer Hours - Type the number of volunteer hours for the date range.
Note: In calculating the value of a volunteer hours, Get Connected uses your state rate as published on the independentsector.org website. You can change this rate by clicking the question mark next to Goals: Volunteer Hours.
Click Update Goals to save your goal settings.
How are Goals Displayed in Get Connected?
Goals—and your community's progress toward them—can be displayed on your site's Volunteer Impact Pages (VIPs) and in your site manager dashboard. Here is an example of the volunteer matches and volunteer hours goals being shown for the selected date range.
To show these charts, select the Annual Impact Chart content type in your VIP/dashboard builder. Click here to learn more.
Note: Check out our article, Building Volunteer Impact Pages, to learn about the different VIP content types and how to share them. For general information on VIPs, see About Volunteer Impact Pages.
Community Impact Areas
An impact area is a defined category to show volunteer impact. Examples can include education, health, and income—or they can be more specific (middle school success, childhood obesity, job training).
In Get Connected, you can measure volunteerism in several ways, and impact area is one of them. When posting a new need, agency managers can indicate the impact areas that the volunteer opportunity targets. Potential volunteers can then search needs by impact area. As volunteers respond to needs and submit volunteer hours, you can track and share hard data regarding impact areas.
Important: If you specify impact areas for your site, agency managers will be required to select an impact area for each need they post.
How Do I Specify Impact Areas for My Platform?
To specify impact areas on your Get Connected platform:
- From your site manager panel, click Settings > Community Impact.
- Scroll down to the Impact Areas section.
- Type an area into the field provided and click Add Area. In the above example, the site manager has already entered Education, Health, and Income.
Once you've created an impact area, you can edit it, disable it, re-enable it (if disabled) and delete it. See the table below for details on the various icons for completing these tasks. All icons appear under the Options column, shown in the previous image.
| Icon | Description |
 | Edit a community impact area. This icon appears only for active (non-disabled) impact areas. |
 | Disable an active community impact area. This icon appears only for active impact areas. Once an area is disabled, it appears with a line through it, as shown here: |
 | Enable a disabled community impact area. This icon appears only for disabled impact areas. |
 | Delete a community impact area. This icon appears only for disabled impact areas, so an impact area must be disabled before it can be deleted. Once deleted, an impact area cannot be recovered. |
How Are Impact Areas Used in Get Connected?
Impact areas show up in several places in Get Connected. Like interests, they are applied to needs (volunteer opportunities), so agency managers can select impact areas for needs, and volunteers can search for needs by impact area.
Agency Managers
If you have specified impact areas on your site, agency managers will have an Impact Area option when posting a new need.
An agency manager may select one impact area per need. If a need spans impact areas, the agency manager should select the one that best applies.
Important: Impact areas and interests are not the same thing in Get Connected. An interest refers to an individual volunteer's preferred types of volunteer work (physical labor, arts and culture, etc.), while an impact area looks specifically at the desired outcome for the need. If an agency manager is posting an opportunity to help spruce up a school's building and grounds, the interest might be "Physical Labor" while the impact area might be "Education." Of course, interests and impact areas may often overlap.
Users/Volunteers
Potential volunteers can search for needs by impact area.
Displaying Community Impact Progress
You can display community impact in several places on your site:
- Public and private volunteer impact pages (VIPs)
- Your site manager dashboard
The process for adding this information is the same for both VIPs and the site manager dashboard. To add community impact data:
- For VIPs, go to Content > Impact Pages. For the site manager dashboard, open your dashboard and click the Edit button next to the heading.
- Add a row (if necessary), and then click Add Content to Row.
- From the Content Type dropdown, select Annual Impact Chart.
- Complete the Learn More fields by entering links to pages that provide more information on your goals for volunteer responses and community impact.
- Click Submit Page.
For more information on building VIPs and the site manager dashboard, check out our article, Building Volunteer Impact Pages.