Skills and Interest Matching with Open-Shift Alerts

BetterUnite can match volunteers to shifts automatically based on the interests and skills they've told you about, and their stated availability. This powers a "Recommended for you" card in the volunteer portal, and lets admins notify the right volunteers when a shift is under-filled.

Setting interests on a volunteer sign-up page

Each volunteer sign-up campaign can be tagged with one or more interests. To configure this, go to the campaign's Edit page and open the Volunteer Interests section. Interests are shown as toggleable chips — click a chip to attach that interest to the campaign, click again to remove it.

The chips available here come from your organization's Interest Options vocabulary, which is defined once in your onboarding settings and shared across all campaigns.

How volunteers capture their interests and skills

Volunteers indicate their own interests and skills the first time they log in to the portal, through the onboarding wizard. They can also update these later from their profile.

• Interests are stored as tags on the volunteer's contact record (for example, a tag like animal welfare).
• Skills are stored the same way, as a separate set of tags (for example, first aid or bilingual — Spanish).

These tags can also be applied manually to a contact by an admin, outside of the wizard.

How matching works

When the matching engine looks for shifts to recommend to a volunteer, it:

1. Looks at active volunteer sign-up campaigns and their upcoming shifts, within a 90-day window.
2. Keeps only shifts that still have open capacity.
3. Excludes shifts the volunteer has already signed up for.
4. Filters out shifts that fall outside the volunteer's stated availability (including any blackout dates they've set).
5. Compares the campaign's tagged interests against the volunteer's own interest tags to find the overlap.
6. Ranks the remaining shifts by how many interests overlap, with soonest-starting shifts breaking ties.

Note: this recommendation step does not check requirements (like background checks or waivers) — that's still enforced separately at the moment the volunteer actually signs up.

The portal "Recommended for you" card

When a volunteer loads their portal home page, they may see a Recommended for you card showing up to six suggested shifts. Each recommendation includes:

• The shift's date and time
• The job(s) being filled
• Badges for the matched interests
• A badge showing spots remaining
• A Sign up link

Admin-side: notifying matching volunteers from Who's Here

If a shift is under-filled, admins can find and reach out to likely-good-fit volunteers directly from the Who's Here page:

1. Open the shift on the Who's Here page and view its match preview. This shows a list of volunteers who meet the campaign's mandatory requirements, have a profile (or have volunteered before), have an email address on file, aren't already signed up, and whose availability fits the shift — ranked by interest overlap.
2. Choose to send notifications. Each matched volunteer receives an individual email containing a sign-up link, and you can include an optional custom message.

Both the match preview and the notify action require the Volunteer Who's Here access right.