The following five notifications can be partially customized for specific initiatives:

  • Need Response Thank You - Sent when someone responds to a need as an individual, as a team leader, or as a team member. Learn more.
  • Users: Welcome to the Team - Sent to team members who (1) already have a Connect platform account, and (2) have been signed up for a need by someone else (a team creator or team leader). Learn more.
  • Volunteer Team Created - Sent to team members who (1) do not already have a Connect platform account, and (2) have been signed up for a need by someone else (a team creator or team leader). Learn more.
  • Upcoming Need Reminder - Sent one week and one day prior to a date-specific need; goes to all volunteers who responded to the need. Learn more.
  • Notify Users Week After Need Happens On - Sent one week after the date-specific need occurs; goes to all volunteers who responded to the need. Learn more.

With initiatives, you can add tags to these notifications that pull information about each specific initiative. For example, if you're running a Day of Caring and a VITA effort concurrently and people are responding to needs for both, the Day of Caring volunteers will have special Day of Caring information in their notifications, while the VITA volunteers will see special VITA information in theirs.

Note: You can also edit the default text of a notification as explained here. However, your edits will be applied to all instances of a notification, regardless what need or initiative it is associated with. The feature described here allows you to pull initiative-specific text into the template.

There are two steps involved in customizing a notification for an initiative: (1) Creating and submitting the initiative-specific text, and (2) adding the initiative-specific tag to the applicable notification.

Note: These steps do not have to be taken in the order shown.

Step 1: Create and Submit Initiative-Specific Text

To write and submit the text that is to go into a notification:

  1. From your site manager panel, go to Volunteerism > Needs and click Initiatives to open the initiatives management area. You will see a table of all existing initiatives.
  2. Click to create or edit an initiative. This action opens the form for creating or editing an initiative.
  3. Scroll down to the three Text Editor boxes beneath the Description field.
  4. In each box, type the message that you want to have included in the applicable notification message.
  5. Click Update Initiative (or Create Initiative, as applicable).

Step 2: Add the Tag To the Notification

Now that you've submitted the text to be included in each notification, you need to add the applicable tag to ensure that it's included.

  1. Access the template, either by going to Communication > Notifications, or by clicking the applicable link on the page for adding or editing an initiative.
  2. In the Message field, place the cursor where you would like the custom initiative message to appear. In the example below, the admin wants it to appear just below the greeting.
  3. In the list of template keys, located to the right of the Message field, click the {{initiative_message}} key.
    The template key now appears in the message.
  4. Click Submit to save the updated template.

Note: Custom initiative messages are not required. If you have other initiatives that do not contain custom messages, the {{initiative_message}} key will be skipped in the notifications.

Note: You cannot type template keys (the words in double brackets) into a custom message.