Additional Fields for Additional Needs

Custom Fields is a new feature that gives your platform the ability to add customized fields on their desired entity (opportunity, organisation, user, and story). 

As of now, you can add values to a list where a user can choose from. In the near future, we will be adding more field types for your convenience.

This is useful when you to know additional details or information about an organisation, user, opportunity or story.

• Do you want to know which department the user is more comfortable volunteering for your organisation?
• Do you have more questions you want to ask a user?
• Do you wish to know which of your services or platforms an organisation is affiliated with?
• Do you want to know which organisation posted a story?

In addition, you have complete control over which entity you want a custom field to appear to. You can add as much custom fields as you want. Custom fields also appear on the details of existing opportunities, organisations, users, and stories where they can be updated.

Let's see how it works in the platform.

Imagine that your organisation has two departments where volunteers can work, "Office" or in the "Field". Now, you wish to know where users are more comfortable volunteering. You can add a custom field solely for that.

Before adding a custom field, the "About You" section of a user profile would look like this:

This is how it looks with the custom field added:

Now, let us say that you also wanted to add the same custom field for opportunities.

Before enabling the custom field for opportunities, a part of the form to be filled out when adding an opportunity looks like this:

After you enable the custom field, it will look like this:

This feature works for stories too! Let us say you prefer to find out which department inspired the story.

Before adding the custom field, the fill out form looks like this:

With the custom field, it will look like this:

Let us try a different field name for organisations. Assuming that there might be international organisations interested in using your platform — you now want to know beforehand if the organisation interested in joining has an international presence.

Before adding a custom field, a part of the form users will have to fill out when adding organisation looks like this:

After enabling the feature, this is how it will look like:

You can also add more than one custom field on a single entity.

Back to the opportunity example. Let's say you also wanted to know the frequency for which the opportunity would take place in addition to what department would the opportunity be affiliated with.

It will now look like this:

There are more to this feature.

What if you 'require' a custom field to be filled out?

It's very easy to do. There is a "Required" attribute that can be switched on from the "Mapping Details" of a custom field.

Back to the first example. Requiring users to fill out the "Department" custom field will look like this:

Note: The presence of a red asterisk indicates the information to be required.

Another perk of this feature is that you can allow users to select multiple values.

With the example above, enabling the "Multiple Values Allowed" attribute will look like this:

There may be cases when a user would have a different answer than the ones listed out on your list. There is an option you can choose that would let users add an additional entry while filling out the form.

To summarize, with the "Custom Fields" feature, you can:

• Add unlimited custom fields to users, opportunities, organisations, and users
• Require any of the custom fields to be filled out (users cannot proceed unless they answer the field)
• Allow multiple values on any custom field to be selected
• Allow users to input an additional value on the spot

Custom fields also have an influence on your Susurate graphs. You can select to see data for projects/ beneficiaries that have a specific custom field when creating a graph. Read more about Susurate here.

If you want to start adding custom fields now, talk to your platform administrator.

For more information:

• Create Custom Fields Across Different Entities
• Custom Fields for Your Portal