Grandparents and parents who volunteer are more likely to have children who volunteer--so when your nonprofit has family-friendly opportunities, be sure and make it easy for families to find and respond to them! This article lists a few ways to highlight family-friendly opportunities on your Connect site.

Designate a Need as "Family Friendly"

When posting a volunteer opportunity, be sure and select the "Family Friendly" designation on the need-posting form.

This designation will appear on the need-information page for volunteers (under Additional Details), and it will be included when volunteers run a search on family-friendly opportunities.

Note: To facilitate group signups, you may also want to select to allow team registration.

Share a Link to Family-Friendly Opportunities

It's easy to grab a link to your site's family friendly opportunities. From the front end of your site, select Needs (or Opportunities) in the left-hand navigation menu, and then search the needs by the "Family Friendly" filter.

When the results are displayed, you might notice that the URL has changed to reflect the search criteria. Just copy the URL to your clipboard and share it on social media, include it in an email, feature it in your eNewsletter, or in a spotlight light on the Volunteer Dashboard.

Tip: The new URL will be very long, so consider shortening it using a URL shortener such as Bitly or TinyURL.

Featuring Family-Friendly Opportunities as a Spotlight

Here are some simple steps for creating a spotlight for your family-friendly opportunities:

  1. From your site manager panel, go to Settings > Spotlights.
  2. Click Add Spotlight.
  3. Complete the fields as suggested:
    Field
    		Suggestions
    Active
    		Make sure this is switch to ON; otherwise, no one will be able to see it!
    Icon
    		Select an icon that suggests families. The "family" icon is great, but "mentor," "people-group," and "heart" icons could also work.
    Color
    		Your choice! You can use one of your branding colors, or check out this Canva article on color symbolism for ideas.
    Text Color
    		Your choice! Just make sure it results in text that is easy to read on your spotlight background!
    Title
    		"Family-Friendly Opportunities" is the obvious choice, but you can be creative: "For Families Who Volunteer," "Bring the Kids!" or a question like, "Looking for a Way to Volunteer with Your Family" are all ideas you can use.
    Subtitle
    		This field is optional and a great place to add more information.
    Target URL
    		Here's where you'll put the URL that you copied to your clipboard.
    Link Text
    		Something as simple as "Click here," will work, but you can also use a phrase like, "Find Family Opportunities."
    Show in Navigation
    		It's always a good idea to have your spotlight show up in the left-hand navigation menu on your site, as this ensures that it will be accessible no matter what page is being viewed.
    Navigation Title
    		This is to be a short title, such as "Family Opportunities" or "For Family Volunteers."
  4. Click Submit Spotlight when you are done. You will be returned to the Manage Spotlights table.

Tip: Use the up and down arrows to move your new spotlight to a more prominent position on the Volunteer Dashboard. The first spotlight will be a the most prominent banner, while the second and third listed will show up as boxes further down on the Volunteer Dashboard. Additional spotlights will not be displayed as colored banners or boxes but will be listed in the left-hand navigation if Show in Navigation was selected.

Here is an example of the spotlight appearing as "Spotlight #1." Note that it's also featured in the side navigation:

To Learn More ...

For more on the benefits of family volunteering and how you can build your pool of family volunteers, check out these articles from Galaxy Digital's blog: