Reports your board will actually read

The board meeting is Tuesday. Someone will ask how many people helped this quarter and for how many hours, and you would like to answer with a number instead of a shrug. Reports in Causefolk exist for exactly that moment.

Three questions, answered

Pick a period: this month, last quarter, the fiscal year, any range. You get hours, people and attendance rate for the whole organization, then the same by cause and by person. Each table exports to CSV, which is to say to the spreadsheet your treasurer already uses.

Where the numbers come from

Every hour has a source. Attendance recorded on a shift, by staff or by self check-in, becomes an entry with the shift’s length unless you adjust it. Work outside a shift, say someone who drove donations across town, is added as manual hours with a note. Guests in a party are counted and their hours credited to the person who brought them.

People means people

The people count is distinct individuals, guests included, not signups. Someone who came twelve times is one person with twelve shifts. That is the number a funder means when they ask.

Your folk see theirs

Every person sees their own total in their portal, and across every organization they help in the “My volunteering” hub. A student who needs service hours for school can read them off the screen.

Attendance rate tells you something

A cause with a 60 percent attendance rate is telling you its shifts are too long, too early or too vague. Fix the shift before you blame the people.

Export before you need it

Pull the CSV at the end of each month and file it. When the grant report asks for last year’s numbers, you will already have them in the format they want.