Why Your Nonprofit Needs a Trusted Volunteer Hour Tracking Platform

Did you know that community service can help improve a volunteer’s health? Or that a person spends about 50 hours every year volunteering? A report from a few years back found that only 55% of nonprofits make an effort to track the impact of their volunteers to understand them better. But things have changed. Thanks to tech tools such as volunteer hour tracking software, you can now easily measure their efforts.

Is your organization keeping track of volunteer hours? If you're not tracking the hours put in by your volunteers, you could be seriously missing out on one of your organization's best and most crucial KPIs (key performance indicators).

If you’re wondering why volunteer hour tracking is so important or how your nonprofit can better manage its volunteers’ efforts, you're in the right place! 

In this article, we’ll explore everything there is to know about volunteer hour tracking. We’ll give you some ‘golden’ advice on automating the process of tracking volunteer hours.

We'll guide you on why user-friendly tracking tools such as Golden's volunteer management software can help make your nonprofit better, stronger, and more efficient.

Why Is Volunteer Hour Tracking Essential?

Nonprofits may not typically need to track payroll or manage volunteer employee compensation. But volunteer tracking is still an essential practice they can’t afford to ignore. There are many reasons why volunteer hour tracking, using the latest software, can help nonprofits make better sense of their volunteers’ efforts.

Tracking volunteer hours allows nonprofits to:

• Increase Grant Eligibility and Boost Fundraising
  By knowing precisely how many volunteer hours are worked, organizations can benefit when they apply for grants, fundraising, and other financial incentives for which they wouldn’t have been eligible without this vital information.
• Learn About Your Volunteers’ Impact
  By tracking volunteer hours, nonprofits will have a much better idea of the effectiveness of their volunteers’ efforts. In this context, if you use Golden's volunteer management software, you'll know precisely where your resources are being applied, what you're getting back in return, and the impact the volunteers make.
• Reduce Turnover, Boost Volunteer Retention
  Your volunteers are the lifeblood of your nonprofit. As you already know, a high turnover rate can drain your limited resources and interrupt the flow of work. Fortunately, we now have volunteer management tools to help reduce turnover rates and boost volunteer retention through effective volunteer recognition and appreciation.

The bottom line is that volunteer tracking eventually puts your organization in control. When your team makes an effort to keep track of its volunteer hours, volunteer management becomes simpler and more effective.

Additionally, volunteers who work with you will also benefit from the practice of volunteer hour tracking. When you measure your volunteers’ efforts using Golden's volunteer hour tracking software, everyone wins!   

Why You Should Track Volunteer Hours (5 Golden Reasons)

Your volunteers do a great deal to help your organization achieve its goals. Let's look at some crucial reasons why nonprofits should take the help of technology and implement a volunteer hour tracking system.

• Get a Better Sense of Your ROI

With a limited budget at your disposal, you must know precisely where your money is spent and the return you can expect for your efforts.

Leveraging volunteer tracking applications or similar technology will allow you to monitor how much of your volunteer resources are used and where they're being applied. 

Knowing this vital information will help you make informed predictions about your expected ROI in future volunteering projects.

• Recognize Volunteers to Make Them Feel Better

Volunteer appreciation ideas and recognition are essential aspects of any nonprofit's efforts. By recognizing and rewarding volunteers for their efforts, organizations can improve volunteer satisfaction and make volunteering with them a more rewarding experience.

Golden's volunteer hour tracking software single-handedly makes this possible! It allows your nonprofit to manage your volunteers’ efforts effectively. Plus, you'll be able to offer more value to the people who work with you.

• Empower the Future of Your Volunteers

Through volunteer hour tracking, nonprofits can create better employment opportunities for their workers in the future.

When your volunteers get to record their own hours, they can use this data-backed information in the future when applying for jobs, training programs, scholarships, or any other educational framework where volunteer experience is required.

Once again, this translates into increased volunteer satisfaction and reduced turnover rates, saving you both time and money in the future. 

• Identify Potential Recruits for Future Projects

Your organization's time attracting and recruiting volunteers can be significantly reduced when the right tools and technologies are used.

By leveraging volunteer hour tracking platforms, you'll be able to collect and aggregate a volunteer database that you can use when seeking volunteers for your next event.

Not only will your database contain the profiles and contact information of your potential recruits, but you can also see how many hours each individual has put into your organization.

In turn, you'll have a much more reliable and efficient process when seeking the best people to help your nonprofit achieve its goals.

• Boost Your Nonprofit’s Reputation

When organizations make the extra effort to track, study, and record volunteer time and efforts on a continued basis, it speaks volumes about their dedication to social causes. 

By leveraging volunteer hour tracking software and modern volunteer management techniques, nonprofits can improve the public's overall perception of what they do. At the same time, it can also enhance how volunteers feel about working together to achieve a common goal.

The best cloud software to schedule volunteers and track hours on Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT!

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How to Put in Place an Effective Volunteer Hour Tracking System (Key Steps)

Now that you know precisely why volunteer hour tracking is vital to your nonprofit, let's look at how you can use Golden's volunteer management software to put an effective system in place:

1. Invest in a Volunteer Management Tool
   The first step is to find a volunteer management platform that fits your organization's goals and structure. While there are many volunteer platforms out there, Golden stands out with its wide range of tools and features that can increase your organization’s efficiency. When you use Golden’s tool to track volunteer hours, you'll also be able to seamlessly attract and recruit volunteers, build a reliable database of profiles, streamline volunteer communication, and easily recognize their efforts.
2. Set up a Check-in, Check-out Process
   With Golden's software, nonprofits can implement easy-to-use applications that allow volunteers to track precisely when they start and finish their work. It will enable you to view how much time each volunteer spends on a particular project and all of your volunteers as a group. The information is vital on multiple fronts: it will help with internal reporting and can also be used as data-backed evidence when applying for financial support, as pointed out earlier.
3. Streamline Communication with Your Volunteers
   Whether you are looking to announce an upcoming volunteer event, attract or recruit potential volunteers, or coordinate planning and organization between you and your volunteers, Golden's volunteer management software makes internal and external communication straightforward and transparent.
4. Gather Detailed Volunteer Data Seamlessly
   Your nonprofit needs to use a platform such as Golden to properly and systematically collect and store volunteer data. As we’ve discussed earlier, the more effectively a nonprofit gathers information about its volunteers’ efforts, the more valuable it can be on various fronts, benefiting both you and your volunteers.

Golden Advice for You!

When organizations step up to raise money for charity or to pursue any social causes, they must focus on implementing the right tools and processes to make things happen without hassles, complications, and interruptions.

One of the essential processes we discussed in this article is volunteer hour tracking, and Golden's volunteer management software is one of the best tools you can use to handle this process.

With Golden, you can properly track and monitor your overall volunteer hours and commitments. It’s the only touchless system that verifies volunteer time in three ways while automatically computing the economic value that you’ll need for your tax form.

In a world where nonprofits are getting bigger and better thanks to technological advancements, why not give the best platform out there a try? That would be our golden advice for you!