Volunteer Hours Tracking

I am interested in tracking the hours that are volunteer and service learning groups put in each semester. I have some samples that Joe gave me, but I want to know how it works at your campus.

So, how do you track hours?

How do you get them to submit their hours to you? What kind of incentives do you offer?

Any help would be appreciated!

Well, what ESF has now are Community Service Reporting Forms, which individual students or student organizations fill out and then give to my supervisor in the Student Life Office. They have to do this in order for their hours to be documented and acknowledged by the college. I know my supervisor compiles them somehow to create an end of year report, though it is not a high-tech process and she wants something different.

Now, while this system has worked in the past, I am working on creating a new system and community service web page that should be up and running soon. ESF's web developer is guiding me in the creation of an online form that students can submit, which will then be e-mailed to me. I will have to type the information into an Excel document I have created, but it will be an ongoing process rather than an end of year time consuming compilation of data. This way, we can easily look at our number of community service hours at any time throughout the year. My web site will have other features that I will show everyone once it's done!

As far as incentives go, I don't have any plans yet. We currently do not have any incentives for completing volunteer work or turning in their hours for us to track. I will have students/organizations that submit volunteer work provide proof within a week (letter/phonecall/pictures), so I may give out an award to students based on the number of hours they complete. I do offer all of my one-time volunteers a simple letter, which I type on ESF letterhead. All it says is the date/time/event/activities completed and to contact me with any questions.

We use paper forms, one for individuals, one for student organizations, then that data is entered into an Excel spreadsheet. I have that file linked to MS Access which I can use to generate reports with the simple query tool, like total hours by month, total hours by organizations, total hours by community organization, etc. It's really easy to do if you have access, if you're interested I can e-mail a copy of the files. I would love to have an online process in addition to it, but I guess having a paper trail has its advantages.

Some of the local community organizations also have copies of these forms and have students fill them out when they go to volunteer, then fax us the copies at the end of the month. This makes things a bit easier for us, but you have to watch out for duplicates.

As far as incentives, we let students know that we keep the files for several years in case they ever need proof down the road, and we also offer awards at the end of the year. At our conference, Colleen mentioned monthly raffles which would be great, but right now our budget is tight so we don't have anything to raffle off. I was thinking about talking to the Campus newspaper about having a monthly feature on an outstanding student organization who has done community service, based on the hours, or having a "scoreboard" of hours for students organizations, but I don't want to leave anyone out either. Sometimes, larger organizations get a ton of hours by doing one event, while other smaller organizations are committed to community service year-round and might lag.

One thing we don't keep track of, that I would like to, is differentiating between students who are volunteering as a requirement (either for class credit, or punitive purposes) vs. students who truly doing their volunteering voluntarily. However, I don't want to make anyone feel bad about it, I think it would be good for analyzing the data at the end.

Our method for tracking volunteer hours at SLU is through self-reporting to a staff member at the Center for Civic Engagement and Leadership who enters the info into a database. This does have its drawbacks, but it seems to work pretty well (if anything there is under-reporting by people who just don't bother to tell us what they're doing).

Incentives for reporting are the fact that its kept on record so that really anyone who works in the center has access to that information and it is used to determine some awards given by the university at the end of the year (cash prizes are always good) at an event that is very well attended. Also, having it on record makes it easy to track and provide concrete evidence should someone want to use the center as a reference.

I know we do paper forms as well but we also created a way for students to send us their hours online through the website. If this is of interest to you I can find out how they did it exactly and let you know.