Your agencies can select the causes and interests that best represent the types of needs they're posting. Volunteers can search for opportunities based on the causes they're passionate about and the types of community opportunities that may interest them. In this lesson, you'll learn about how you or your partner agencies can assign custom causes and interests to the needs they're posting.
What Do Causes & Interests Do?
Let’s start with the basic idea:
Causes are associated with agencies.
Interests are associated with needs.
What that means is, you or your agency managers can select causes that relate to the agency so that when a volunteer indicates that a cause is important to them, that agency and its needs will be recommended to them. Interests are tied to a need when it is created, so that a volunteer will be prompted with needs that match with the interests they’ve identified for themselves.
These two tools are a great way to help volunteers find the agencies and needs that align with their values or what they are passionate about. It’s like a dating site, but for volunteerism. Live United, right?
Should I Change My Causes & Interests?
So here’s something special for you. Our 16 default causes and 16 default interests - the ones that automatically show up on your site - were created with United Way in mind. We made these for you. So you might not have any need to change them.
That said, every local United Way is different. So you are free to change these to whatever makes the most sense for you. And even if you love the list as it is, you can add more.
For causes and for interests, you can choose to have as few as 0 and as many as 24, as long as you select multiples of four. So feel free to add some things that show your local UW’s personality or individual mission.
If you do want to change the number of either causes or interests, you can contact Customer Care or ask your Launcher. If you just want to change the ones you have, you can do that yourself. Let’s talk about how.
How Do I Change Them?
If you want to change the titles of your allotted causes or interests, you have four steps, but they are pretty simple and can even be fun.
Navigate to either Causes or Interests in your Site Settings.
Remove one of the existing causes or interests - to open up a slot.
Key in a name for your custom cause or interest and click “Add New Cause” (or Interest).
Pick a color and icon. (Okay, when we said it was fun, this is what we meant. We’re easily entertained.)
How Do I Get Agencies to Select Causes
Causes and Interests are only useful if they are linked to agencies and needs. So how do you make sure your agencies select at least one cause? In your site settings, you can require agencies to select a cause that matches their mission:
