Nonprofits Tracks Volunteer Hours

Ardoch is a children’s education charity focused on improving educational outcomes for children and young people in disadvantaged communities. Ardoch delivers tailored education and wellbeing programs that increase engagement in education, build aspirations and enhance learning outcomes for children in disadvantaged communities. They also mobilize volunteers to support schools and early childhood services and advocate for change.

Sarah Segal is the Programs Coordinator of Education Volunteers and Training who manages a few hundred volunteers and shares her story as they transitioned from paper logs to Track it Forward. 

Ardoch depends on volunteers to keep track of their hours for reporting and funding purposes. Accurate reporting provides them with the evidence they need to take to funders so that they can keep mobilizing volunteers in the community. In the past, volunteers would hand write their hours into log books at the school they volunteered at, and someone would have to travel to each location to pick up these books. As you can imagine, it was starting to become impossible to keep reminding everyone to keep track of their hours as well as to drive to each school to pick up these books. So as a non-profit, they went on the search for an efficient and low-cost approach to tracking hours.  

Once they found Track it Forward and decided to convert, it was a game changer. "We can, now, easily track our volunteer's hours in real time and also easily see if our volunteers have missed any sessions. We can easily compare hours against the school term and year and report back to managers and to the board on our progression. We now feel very confident going to funders with how many volunteers we have and how many hours they volunteer on a term, month and annual basis," says Sarah.

To ensure that the program is successful, Sarah and her team onboard their new members onto Track it Forward right from the beginning. They spend time during their face to face training to ask volunteers to download the app, then they show them the website on a projector and make sure to answer any questions, and lastly they ask the volunteers to log those training hours as a test to make sure volunteers know what information they need to input and how to do it. Another critical aspect of a successful implementation is that Sarah makes sure to clearly explain the importance of these hours for the operation of their organization. Because of this, Ardoch has over a 90% participation rate, which is of the highest in Track it Forward and difficult to achieve for many large non-profit organizations. 

Sarah shares, "Using Track it Forward allows our volunteers to have accountability and visibility of how many hours they are volunteering. Week by week our volunteers and Ardoch can see in real time the impact we are having in the community. For the first time, we feel confident that all the amazing work our volunteers do is being captured and reported on correctly and efficiently."

What a great impact they are making. Make sure to check them out, especially if you're a fellow Aussie!