Tracking volunteer activities / hours
As a volunteer-run organisation, our most important assets is our volunteers. The amount of work they do differs a lot. Some work very hard, others have only signed up. We want to make sure that the volunteers are not just signed up, but also taking action.
The @Oversight Team has already had some discussions about this earlier. But we want to know what you think!
The biggest one is: how much ours people spend per week. This information is valuable for ourselves, as we want to find out which works well to motivate people. We want to get data to make sure our strategy is actually causing volunteers to take action. It's also valuable for potential funders, as it shows that we're actually doing stuff.
There are at least 4 approaches that we discussed:
The @Oversight Team has already had some discussions about this earlier. But we want to know what you think!
What do we currently track
- Informally, we hear about things that people are doing
- The #did-a-thing-
channel is a nice timeline of actions - The airtable #Track lobby efforts (crm) form tracks outreach actions
The biggest one is: how much ours people spend per week. This information is valuable for ourselves, as we want to find out which works well to motivate people. We want to get data to make sure our strategy is actually causing volunteers to take action. It's also valuable for potential funders, as it shows that we're actually doing stuff.
How can we measure this?
There are at least 4 approaches that we discussed:
- Team leads track hours of volunteers. The leads choose how. Perhaps they ask in a meeting, perhaps they give a rough estimate, perhaps they call every individual. It's up to them.
- Quarterly surveys. We send out a survey every 3 months to all volunteers, containing multiple questions. This could also be useful for keeping track of other things.
- Weekly form / survey. Every volunteer receives a short 1-minute form, enters the number of hours for last week and expected for next week.
- Integrate with gamification. The Unknown project contains ideas to make entering data fun. This is probably the best outcome, but also difficult to do well.
- Share your other ideas
- Share your takes / opinions on these ideas
