It's the end of the year, and now you need to generate a report of how many hours each volunteer did this year. Suddenly you realize only a handful of people turned in a paper form. How can you generate a report?! You quickly send out email blasts, receive hundreds of submissions the week before, and even more at the very last minute. Whew, now all you have to do is put them into a spreadsheet, and thankfully there's only a.. couple thousand!? You stay up all night and the next, and even start employing your family to do data entry. Once it's all done, you print out that nice and polished 1 page report. The administrator looks at the page, puts it on a stack of papers, and says "Good job, this is exactly what I wanted! Can you do this next year too?" Yeah right!

Does that sound familiar?

It's the classic story of organizations that need to generate reports but do not have the proper technological infrastructure to make it happen. Usually, a volunteer organizer -- who is also a volunteer themselves-- or an over worked and under paid staff member has to do all this work. It is not fair for the staff, and especially not fair if they are a volunteer. Time is money, yes, even if they are a volunteer. A better system could be setup, a system where volunteers are empowered to do the data entry themselves so generating reports is easy.

We met countless organizers who had this exact issue, and we knew a technological solution was the right answer. Volunteers log their own hours, see their own progress, and organizers create instant reports. Time should be spent training and interacting with volunteers, not with data entry and figuring out how to make spreadsheets work. And this process worked time and time again for nonprofits to get their annual hour totals, for schools to make sure their students have met the minimum service hour requirement, and for grassroots organizations who want to reward and recognize their volunteers for such impeccable service.

Tracking time with technology has helped hundreds of organizations save time and money, but more importantly, restored respect to the ones that do the hard work and deserve it the most.