The purpose for me to keep up with vols and their hours is to properly recognize them at the end of the year. I would feel REALLY bad if I left someone out, but the most important reason that I stress tracking hours is because vol hours should be turned in to our Board of Ed for the purposes of grants(which we desperatly need) and it also helps with statistics for research. A few years ago my state was one of the first states to develope a program for parental involment of it's kind. I am sure they relied on the hours that the districts turned in to determine which direction to go.
If you go to office.microsoft.com/templates/
, there are several database templates that you can download. There is an Access database for volunteer information as well as a fundraising database.
I also use Microsoft Excel to track all the hours (from a sign in sheet kept in the office). I track it by person and generally by the category of volunteer work they do (field trip, cafeteria, reading, other classroom, PTA, etc.) At the end of the school year, I need to provide a report to the principal of how many total hours were incurred, the total number of volunteers, and the categories of volunteer work done. I've been told the superintendent then uses those figures for grants and budget discussions.
In addition, I use it then to thank volunteers, and to get a feel for who the more active volunteers are. Helps in future recruiting. Plus we have some people whose companies match their volunteer hours with money, so I need to keep track of how many hours they put in.
I learned Access a while back and agree that it could be helpful. But--my experience is that not very many people know it or have access to it, so while it may work for you, it may not be so easy to hand over to someone else. Excel seems to be much more widely accepted/available.
There are some programs out there you can buy where you can set up a computer in your school's office and then have people sign in and out on it, so it does the tracking for you. Seems that the lowest cost for the software that I can recall is something like $400, though, which is out of reach for most people.
Thanks everyone. I was ambitious today and learned how to use Access Database (I was an IT person many moons ago, in my prior life). I am starting to come up with a design that I like. Of course I'll share it with whomever wants it when I am done. Maybe someone can beta test it for me. I've tried to design the database to work for both volunteers and donators.
Keep the ideas coming!!
Wouldn't it be cool if I could have a login screen on an office computer where the volunteer could easily log their own hours. hmmmm, maybe I can use one of those old cumbersome computers we (pto) just replaced with Dells. hmmm.
I have an Excel spreadsheet that was developed as a volunteer database at the beginning of the year. It's very detailed.
I'm e-mailing it to you now. If anyone else wants it, e-mail me
