My Account
Volunteer Software

People Helping People

The first wave of CNCS grantees who are competing in 2012 under the new performance measures need to evaluate their data with help from the Reporter as well as their own analysis. Volunteer Reporter will be adding specific features to address these requirements when the next version comes out—they cannot be added via a patch. Probably there will be a way to designate a Placement as a volunteer’s primary job. Until then, evaluating your existing data will help you to determine which will become your Primary Focus Area as will be required for CNCS grant writing and reporting.

As part of a planning strategy for the new perfomance measuers, one Reporter user created a custom code in Volunteers to tag each volunteer into one Focus Area to define that volunteer’s main type of work. That custom list of Focus Areas in the Volunteer Profile does not interact with the actual ones for jobs, it’s just for categorizing volunteers’ work. This ought to help to channel volunteers into the organization’s chosen Primary Focus Area. That information could help to determine the current number of volunteers in one area in order to project a proposed number of volunteers for grant writing.

Here’s a quick view of adding a list of primary focus areas (values) to a code field in Volunteer Fields.

File menu | Field Lists | Volunteer Fields

  1. Rename the first available Code Field to e.g., Volunteer’s Primary Focus Area
  2. Check the box in the Use? column.
  3. Click the Edit List button.
  4. Click the Add button.
  5. Type a focus area. OK.
  6. Repeat to add each focus area. OK. Close.

vol_focus_area

Then each volunteer would be assigned to one focus area in the Volunteer Profile.

Focus Areas as Listed in Volunteer Reporter v6.0

Education
Healthy Futures
Environmental Stewardship
Economic Opportunity
Disaster Recovery/Relief
Capacity Building
Other

Six Focus Areas as Listed in CNCS Performance Measures

Education
Healthy Futures
Veterans and Military Families
Environmental Stewardship
Economic Opportunity
Disaster Services

Veterans and Military Families Focus Area

Some grantees are manually adding Veterans and Military Families as a Focus Area in the Reporter.

Two other CNCS performance measures are not primary Focus Areas, but they can be tracked in the Reporter under Focus Areas.

Capacity Building
Other Community Priorities

Counting Each Volunteer Only Once in a Primary Job

The Reporter has always provided unduplicated totals in reports. The ability to identify which job the volunteer is counted in will have to be added in a new version of the Reporter. Currently, report totals are unduplicated volunteers but you cannot determine in which job a volunteer is counted.

Revised 12/10/2012 10:13:40

BACK TO TUTORIALS