Volunteering

Basic volunteer time tracking, a standard offering in all Little Green Light accounts, is a lightweight way to track how much volunteering time is accruing to your organization and which volunteers have been engaged. It’s possible to track volunteer categories, volunteering date, volunteer hours, types of hours, number of hours, the type of volunteering that was done, volunteering commitments, as well as a description of the work.

Volunteer categories

You can add custom volunteer categories and fields, which, when set up and in use, can give you more ways to slice and dice your volunteering data.

You can set up these attributes by going to Settings > Menu items > Volunteering menu items. From here, click the Add values button under Volunteering categories to add classifications that you can assign to your volunteer entries. Or click the Add custom volunteering fields button to add new custom categories that you can add your choice of values to:

Once your volunteering categories and fields are set up, you can add them to your volunteering time entries (see the following section of this article for more information), like this:

Volunteer time

You can add volunteering information to any constituent by clicking the More actions button in the Related activity section of the constituent record:

You can then enter and save the entry form, as long as you have provided information in the required fields at minimum. (Required fields include "volunteer category", "date", "hours greater than 0", and "constituent".)

Multiple ways to enter volunteering time

It is also possible to add volunteering time using the Actions button within a search result:

Or you can add it from directly within the constituent record:

Add volunteering time in bulk

It’s also possible to add volunteering time to multiple constituent records at once. You can do this from the Constituents tab by searching for the records you want to add volunteering time to and selecting all of the records that are applicable (Click the Select 4 button shown below or check the checkbox next to the constituent name/s, if you want to select some but not all of the constituents). Once you have selected the records, use the Bulk edit menu and select Add volunteering. You will then complete a single volunteer record form, which will be reviewed and saved to all of the selected records.

Volunteering summary

All volunteering activity is listed in the Related activity section on the Constituent Details page. It is also summarized directly below the giving summary:

Volunteer commitments

If it makes sense to track someone’s commitment to volunteer, you can add a new commitment and time entries:

You can also search by volunteering commitment name from the Activity > Volunteering > Volunteering Commitments page:

Volunteer reports

You can generate volunteer reports in two ways:

Constituent reports group data at the constituent level. You can find out a lot about the constituent in such a report, such as their total giving and their volunteer time entries. Every row (or page, in the case of a PDF report) will be a roll-up for a single constituent.
Volunteering reports group data based on volunteer entries. You can create a report, for instance, that shows every single volunteer entry for the time period you specify. If a single constituent volunteered eight times in that time period, your report will contain eight rows of data.

There are multiple types of constituent and volunteering reports you can create, as described below:

In a constituent report, using the “Volunteer Hours Last Fiscal (pdf)” template:

NOTE: There’s also a template available for “This Fiscal”.

The report yields one page per constituent, summarizing volunteer activity by category and showing individual entries by date, as shown here.

In a constituent report, using the “Volunteer Hours (csv)” template:

Reporting by constituent shows lots of information about the constituent and summarizes hours and count for current and prior fiscal years.

In a volunteering report, choosing to use the “Volunteering” template. This shows every volunteering time entry, with date, hours, category, and description:

In a volunteering report, using the “Volunteering Categories (csv only)” template:

This creates a summary report by volunteer category showing count and hours, as shown here:

Custom volunteer reports

You can also create custom reports for both constituent reports and volunteering reports.

In the example below, we are generating a report on the 15 constituents who have volunteered between 2016 and today, We will get back columns showing total hours volunteered between 2016 and today.

Example of a custom constituent volunteer report: