Refugee Nonprofit Tracks Hours for Government Contracts

The Refugee Women’s Alliance (ReWa) is a nonprofit organization located in Seattle that offers 8 holistic wrap-around services in over 50 languages and dialects for refugees and immigrants. In ReWA’s 35 years of work with multicultural communities, they have refined their services to most effectively promote integration and self-sufficiency. All services are designed to stabilize clients, promote acculturation, increase language proficiency, and improve employability quickly and effectively.

Seth Walker, who serves as the Annual Giving Officer and formerly held the role of Volunteer Coordinator at ReWa, engaged in an interview with us to discuss their implementation of Track it Forward and how it helped their organization.

“ReWA offers everything from early learning childcare to senior programs,” he says. “We are a big organization and offer services for housing, employment, citizenship, domestic violence, youth programs, and ESL (English as a second language) classes among others, across 8 different facilities in Puget Sound and online.”

“Our volunteer program spans across our entire organization,” Seth says. “We usually have around 50 to 80 active volunteers at a time…and our biggest volunteer program is with our ESL program,” he explains. “Volunteers play a huge role in being able to bring the programs to life and connect with our students and families. Our volunteers range from high school seniors to lawyers offering pro bono services.”

The Importance of Tracking Volunteer Hours

It’s important for ReWa to track volunteer hours for auditing purposes. “We are largely funded through contracts with state agencies and local governments,” Seth explains. Some of the contracts require a minimum number of volunteer hours in order to be fulfilled. “That was the biggest reason we needed to track hours, for auditing and reporting back to the contractors,” he says.

With so many programs and volunteer hours to keep track of, a time tracking system is key. Prior to finding Track it Forward, volunteer hours were tracked via paper and excel spreadsheets. “Tracking volunteer hours was all manual. We had physical timesheets that people would write on,” Seth says. He quickly realized that tracking via paper and excel was not capturing data thoroughly enough and decided to find a solution like Track it Forward.

“I brought it forward to our executive director and we had a few strategic meetings about it,” Seth says. “Track it Forward made sense…It reduced stress for program coordinators by removing their responsibility to collect timesheets and track the hours manually…and for volunteers, it’s simple to use, and that was very important for us,” he says.

“Track it Forward made sense...It reduced stress for program coordinators”

The price point was also an important factor when it came to choosing a volunteer software. “Track it Forward is a good value, and a lot of the other [software] is very expensive. As a nonprofit, we’re working on a tight budget, so Track it Forward gave us what we need,” Seth says. “And we don’t use [paper] timesheets anymore - so thank the lord for that!” he says with a laugh.

The hours log and reporting features in Track it Forward are the most important for ReWa. “It’s helpful that volunteers can go in through an app or web browser and [log hours],” Seth says. “On the back end, being able to generate reports has been very helpful, because that’s something that used to take hours to do manually in Excel,” he explains.

Thanks to Track it Forward, Seth has been able to hand over the volunteer coordinator role with confidence. “When I stepped in, there was just so much paperwork, it was hard to know what was going on. Now, being able to have somebody else come on board and have everything in one place makes the transition easier,” Seth says.

Streamlining and digitizing their volunteer time tracking process with Track it Forward has allowed ReWa to become more efficient. “Time tracking and reporting [with Track it Forward] has been the biggest help,” Seth says. Now Seth and his colleagues can focus on what’s really important - fundraising and running their volunteer programs.