Written by Kasey Murphy

Assistance League of Newport-Mesa has just over 250 member volunteers who run the Thrift Shop and Treasures on Consignment shop. In addition to these areas, the volunteer programs include the Cheri Harris Dental Center, Operation School Bell®, Scholarship Program, and the Kids on The Block. These philanthropic programs help bring the community together and provide for children and families that may need assistance.

Assistance League of Newport-Mesa needs to report to the national organization at the end of each fiscal year how many volunteer hours they have contributed to their community.

Property Manager and previous President of Assitance League of Newport-Mesa Tracy Halphide explains, “Our national organization likes to have our volunteer hours each year because then they combine it with the total hours from all the chapters to showcase the power of Assistance League.”

In addition, to help prove eligibility to be a 501(c)(3) organization to the IRS, chapter organizations need to have their volunteer hours tracked.

So, accurate records on volunteer hours are pretty important to Assistance League! The process behind recording and getting these volunteer hours in a safe database is not one to take lightly.

Beyond these necessities, Assistance League of Newport-Mesa found that recording their chapter organization’s volunteer hours was useful for donations. Donors liked to be able to see the efforts that they would be putting their money towards.

And, to make sure that donors were aware of their nonprofit status, Assistance League of Newport-Mesa wanted to get approval from a well-known website, GuideStar. In order to receive the top-level stamp of approval - Platinum - organizations must show that they are focused on measuring progress and results. What better way than to have a volunteer tracking system?

With this in mind, Assistance League of Newport-Mesa thought it would be essential to segregate the different volunteer opportunities that they offer.

Assistance League of Newport-Mesa can offer volunteer hours in “service” categories as well as “administrative” volunteer hours for their volunteer board or for internal events like fundraisers. It was important for them to distinguish between these two when doing data reports for volunteer hours.

And even more so organized, Assistance League of Newport-Mesa wanted to see the different volunteer programs like the Cheri Harris Dental Center, Operation School Bell, and the Kids on the Block all side-by-side.

“At the end of the year, we need to understand how many hours went towards revenue generation and how many hours went towards philanthropic programs,” says Tracy.

With all of these reasons to track their volunteer hours, a very complex and complete process needs to be in place.

How Assistance League of Newport-Mesa Tracks Volunteer Hours

At first, Assistance League of Newport-Mesa used paper, pens, and email to log volunteer hours. The hours were collected by volunteers and added to a spreadsheet on a quarterly basis. As a large chapter organization, this was found to be a bit of a large time commitment. 

The membership committee had to meet quarterly for a few days just to gather reports. Tracy says, “We were very old school using paper and pencil, we had forms that we had to fill out once a quarter which seemed to be difficult for people, Track It Forward is a big time saver.” 

Assistance League of Newport-Mesa uses Track It Forward to help keep track of their volunteer hours, run reports on the data, and create organized data on each individual volunteer program and the volunteer program as a whole.

Volunteers Use The Mobile App 

The main feature of Track It Forward that Assistance League of Newport-Mesa wanted to use was the mobile app for volunteers.

With a chapter organization workflow where volunteers log their own hours, Track It Forward volunteer hour logging was easy to implement. Volunteers just log their hours into their Track It Forward volunteer dashboard, and then Assistance League of Newport-Mesa can access the volunteer data through their Track It Forward site!

Tracy says, “We started the search for a web-based solution because we had a lot of the Assisteens group asking if they could log their hours via an app, and some of the younger adult members were asking if the same question. After a search of the available options, we found that Track It Forward met all of our criteria.  The website was easy to use and there was an app.”

Volunteers can easily use the mobile app to log their hours and view their volunteer timesheet! 

Reports on Each Volunteer Program

In addition to easy volunteer hour logging, Track It Forward makes it easy for hours to be logged under their specific program.

Due to their settings in the software, Assistance League of Newport-Mesa was able to have volunteers pick from a drop-down menu what volunteer program they completed. There are service hours - which are all of the volunteer programs: Thrift, Treasures on Consignment, Dental Center, Kids on the Block, or Operation School Bell. There is also ‘other hours’ category that is used for committee work, board, or administration efforts. These needed to be separate. Below is a depiction of the hour log for Assistance League of Newport-Mesa.

This segmented hour log allows reports to be made based on these different activities. So, along with reports of all volunteer hours, Assistance League of Newport-Mesa can pull distinct reports based on the activities.

Track It Forward allows reports to be instantly downloaded from the data with multiple different variations. Assistance League of Newport-Mesa also creates reports from their Assisteens volunteers which can be sorted by grade. Since the volunteer program is for students who may need their hours for school, this is important to them!

When it comes to reports, Track It Forward reports save a lot of time. “We don’t have to do a lot of input, it’s much better than having to submit 250 people’s hours for reports quarterly into a spreadsheet.”

How Chapter Organizations Can Implement Track It Forward

Assistance League of Newport-Mesa uses Track It Forward for its standard features - volunteer hour logging and time tracking!

Tracy says, “Overall, it really has been an easy tool for us to adapt, we chose it because of the interface on the app, and because of the backend data we can pull out of it.”

One thing that chapter organizations may struggle with is thinking of how to move from their current method of time tracking to using software or Track It Forward.

Track It Forward focuses on creating an easy transition process for organizations. Assistance League of Newport-Mesa used a beta group to test Track It Forward for the first year. Twenty of their 250 volunteers used Track It Forward for a year to make sure they ironed out all of the details with setting up the software. 

Tracy says, “We really took the time to understand what our needs were as well as the capabilities of the program and that made it better so when we rolled it out full-scale, everything was ironed out at that point.”  

If you are a larger chapter organization, don’t hesitate to take extra precautions like these to make sure you are using your software as efficiently as possible -- it has worked for Assistance League of Newport-Mesa for years!