Building Your First Opportunity

Opportunities are the main way that you will record activity in CERVIS. There are three different types of opportunities that allow you to create different kinds of activities for which your volunteers can register. To begin, let’s consider an example opportunity occurring this Saturday from 9:00am-12:00pm.

We have included descriptions of several important fields to include when creating a Normal Event below. Please keep in mind that this example is for a one-time opportunity, if you have something that occurs more than one time or on a regular basis (e.g. weekly), there are other options available. For more details on the different opportunity types, review the article linked HERE.

To begin creating a new event, click on “Add New Opportunity” from under the Opportunity Management heading on the Main Dashboard.

Opportunity Name: enter the title of the event, this is the first information that volunteers will see about this opportunity.

Opportunity Description: include information about the event that volunteers will see when they want to learn more about it.

Start Date/Time and End Date/Time: enter the actual start and end time of your even

Service Credit Hours: enter the number of hours of credit your volunteers will receive for this event. In this example, the service credit hours would be 3.

Number of Volunteers Needed: enter the number of volunteers you need for this opportunity.

Allow Waitlist When Registration is Full: enable the system to open a waitlist on an event after the limit for the number of volunteers has been reached instead of closing registration. Waitlists are an available function on Normal or Time Slot Events.

Organizer: select a user with at least Event Leader access to be listed as the point of contact for this event.

Meeting Location: the name of the location (e.g. “Warehouse”, “Main Office”, etc.)

Meeting Location Address: enter the actual location of the event (i.e. physical address, GPS coordinates, or cross streets).

Allow Mobile Volunteer Sign-in: allows your volunteers to use their personal mobile device to sign in and out of an opportunity. 

Send Automatic Reminder E-mail / SMS Message: send a reminder email or SMS message (if you have SMS enabled in your system) a certain number of days or weeks before the event takes place.

Interest Category/Secondary Interest Category: as mentioned in the Creating Interest Categories article, every opportunity in CERVIS must be associated with one Interest Category and can be associated with two for further filtering. This is where you assign the category or categories to an opportunity.

Publish Online: this field is very important as it determines whether or not an opportunity is displayed to your volunteers. This option is set to “No” by default which means that volunteers cannot see or register for this opportunity on their own (although you can send invitations). Any of the “Yes” options will allow volunteers to see the opportunity , but only “Yes - Open” will allow your volunteers to both see and register for it.