Managing volunteers without the volunteer module

Alex Reeve 2 · January 2020

Hi,

We're looking to track volunteer hours but do not have the BB module - numbers are too small to warrant purchasing a solution. We've in the past used gift subtypes and then allocated an amount per hour in order to track it (we don't reconcile our system with finance, so no issues with us posting as cash so long as it's against the volunteering appeals).

A colleague has passed on some notes from a previous organisation which say "each volunteering appeal package has a number of hours allocated to it, This should be noted in the marketing source code field per the table below" - the table just shows activity and number of hours. But does this make sense to anyone? I thought perhaps they meant package attributes?

All we need is to be able to have a number of hours per activity, and record it in a way which means it's easy to view and query on.

Does anyone have any suggestions please?

Thanks

Rob Cameron · January 2020

Hello Alex, Great question. We have had the same conundrum. Your ideas of using gifts and possibly appeals have merit as long as you don't mind muddying up the waters associated with those areas of the database. In our case, we do pay for the event module for regular events but co-oped it for tracking volunteer hours. It made some sense because many volunteer their time during already scheduled events and it is possible to "think of" their volunteer time as event. Here is how we do it:

1. We tag them as a volunteer primarily through constituent codes with a start and an end date when they stop volunteering. This makes it easy to query on them.

2. We have a wide variety of constituent codes that label what type of volunteer they might be (Office Volunteer, Board/Cabinet/Committee Volunteer, and Event Volunteer). Sometimes we even track if someone volunteers for another organization.

3. For Office Volunteers - we add them as a registrant for an event called "Office Volunteering XXXX (year)". Under participation, we code the type of volunteering they are doing (more specific than above). Every time a volunteer comes into the office, we use the Registration Fees to enter the number of "hours" they a gave along with dates, etc. Once we complete our year end, we will create a new event for the next year to track hours.

4. For Board/Cabinet/Committee Volunteer - We made the decision not to track their hours (there wasn't enough ROI for us on that) and much of their time is meeting oriented and could be estimated from that. But we do track certain actions either on their record or against specific donors that they help with.

5. For Event Volunteer - We register them for the event in question. Mark them as seated or not seated as appropriate. If they were solicited by someone to volunteer, we fill in the solicitor name. Under participation we select the core volunteer role they will be fulfilling. We mark them as attended. Again, we decided the ROI was not there in order to track their specific hours but if we did, we would do it in the same way as we do for Office Volunteers.

6. For Reporting - We created 3 different queries for the above types of volunteers that produce the information we need in each case. It also makes it really easy for future event planning to know who has volunteers in past years, and the types of roles they completed. Our Board loves that we can track the number of office volunteer hours we have been gifted and the things we were able to accomplish without adding another paid body to our expense statement.

Of course all of this is contingent on having the event module for tracking events. Hopefully this helps! Rob

Alex Reeve 2 · January 2020

Hi Rob,

Thanks for the extremely helpful reply - that is a good system using the Events module, which we do have, but haven't used for any other purpose other than the odd event we hold. I'll have a think this end about doing something similar as that seems to make a lot of sense.

Thanks again!

Alex

Christine Cooke 2 · February 2020

You could set it up in Actions and use the Actions Attributes to record the hours worked and for which area they are volunteering.

Managing volunteers without the volunteer module

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