Attendance and reports
Confirm who turned up
After an opportunity has run, open the Volunteers tab and mark who attended.
This is the step that gets skipped, and skipping it is expensive. Hours are credited from confirmed attendance, so a shift nobody marks up is a shift where every volunteer earned nothing and your own reports read as zero. It takes a minute and it is the only record that the day happened.
Attendance counts the guests a volunteer brought as well, which is why the signup form asks for a number rather than leaving people to bring who they like unannounced.
Approve logged hours
A volunteer can log hours themselves against an opportunity they joined. What happens next depends on the self-reported hours setting on that need:
- Manual review. The claim waits for you, on the Approvals tab. Nothing is counted until you approve it.
- Auto-approve. The claim counts immediately.
- Inherit. Whatever your organization default says.
Manual review is the right default for most organizations. Auto-approve is reasonable for a long-running opportunity with regulars you know.
What the reports show
The Reports tab covers a date range you choose:
| Number | What it counts |
|---|---|
| Estimated hours | Person-hours from confirmed attendance, including guests brought along. |
| Unique volunteers | How many different people, rather than how many signups. |
| Attendance rate | How many of the people who signed up actually came. |
| Total signups | Everyone who said they would come. |
Alongside those are hours over time, your most popular opportunities, and your top volunteers. The whole thing exports to CSV or Excel, which is the format a funder or a board report wants.
Attendance rate is the number worth watching. A low rate is not usually people being unreliable, it is a signup form that made committing too easy or a reminder that did not say enough about what the day involves.
Who can see what
Owners and editors see volunteers and their details. Viewers see the aggregate numbers only, with no volunteer personal data, which is what makes the viewer role safe to hand to a funder. See invite your team.