Catholic Schools Track Volunteer Hours

St. Matthew Catholic school in Columbus, Ohio, like many other parochial schools, allows for subsidization of some tuition costs in exchange for family involvement within the ministry. Karen has five children enrolled in the school and is an active member of the church community. As she was volunteering a few years ago she observed how unreliable and messy their volunteer time tracking system was. One volunteer was collecting stacks of papers, counting and confirming all the volunteer hours for around 600 students with around 2500 families in order to sort out who had met the required hours to qualify for the tuition assistance. As she watched that solitary volunteer dedicate so much time -- nearly three solid weeks -- to shuffling through piles of papers she thought, “I’m dying watching you do this.”

Karen is all about efficiency and loves working with Excel. She felt compelled to find a better system. She looked around, found Track it Forward and discovered how easy it was to use with Excel. The upfront, low cost was also agreeable to the parish budget. She convinced the Pastor and Principal that they should at least try it. The option to pay as you go monthly, made the decision to join very low pressure.

Three years later they have saved an incredible amount of time and energy. Features like the mobile app and flexible configurations that allow for logging past and future hours address any parents who might forget to log their hours or who regularly volunteer at odd intervals of time. “There’s no reason you can’t log your time”, Karen says. The school looks more at the total number of volunteer hours not the specific times that they did them. She also keeps track of who has met their hours and who hasn’t by sorting through reports and is able to send out friendly reminder emails to those who haven’t started working on them yet.

Karen stays completely organized by using her Excel knowledge to directly import all the families of the school at the beginning of the year into Track it Forward and then assigns them a unique name and number identifier. Most are returning students so she just updates them. She is able to manage massively registering an entire school system each year along with the children completing their Confirmation hours with very little follow up maintenance. Something that used to take up to three weeks out of the school year at a time to organize now takes only 4-5 focused hours for setup at the beginning of the school year.

“I feel like the thing runs itself” - Karen