❖ Heads up! This article is only intended for Site Managers.
Establishing Hours settings is important for effective volunteer management. With your Get Connected site, you can determine the types of hours you allow on your site, set up how you want hours to be approved, and more. All of this can be managed from Settings > Hours on your site!
Hours Settings
Here you can determine the kinds of hours you want to allow on your site and the value of the volunteer hour!
Individual Hours
These are the hours a volunteer performed without submitting a Need or Opportunity response on your Get Connected site. If you toggle this Off, then any hours a volunteer submits on your site must have an associated Need or Opportunity response. Be sure to click Update Settings to save any changes you make.
Require Contact Email for Individual Hours
If you allow Individual Hours, you can also require volunteers to share a contact email for someone who can vouch for those completed hours. This simply shares the contact information with the Site Managers so they can reach out if they wish. Be sure to click Update Settings to save any changes you make.
Allow "Plus-one" Hours
If you'd like to allow volunteers to add hours for family or friends who participated in a volunteer Need or Opportunity with them but don't have a volunteer account on your site, you can toggle this On. Be sure to click Update Settings to save any changes you make.
Value of a Volunteer Hour
Here you can set the value of a volunteer hour. The default value is pulled from the Independent Sector, but you can still override that value here. Be sure to click Update Settings to save any changes you make.
Volunteer Hours Submission Form
Here you can select which fields you want to appear on the Hours Submission form when volunteers go to submit hours. There are three fields that you can either enable or require. Enabled means they appear to the volunteer. Required means they must answer them to submit the hours. Check the boxes for the ones you want and be sure to click Save to save your changes.
Hours Questions
You can collect important information from volunteers when they submit hours for the volunteer Needs or Opportunities they've completed. Here are some examples of the kinds of follow-up questions you might ask with custom hours questions:
How was your volunteer experience?
Would you like to share any images from the opportunity for us to post on our social media pages?
How likely are you to volunteer with us again?
Is there anything we can change to improve the volunteer experience with us?
To add custom hours questions:
Go to Settings > Hours, then scroll to the Hours Questions section and click Add Hours Question.
Complete the Add Custom Question form.
Status: The status of the question. Select Active to include this question on the Volunteer Hours Submission Form immediately, Pending if you want to return later and finish setting it up, or Inactive when you are ready to remove the question from the form.
Type: This determines how the volunteer answers the question.
Small and Large Text Field: These give your volunteers a blank field to fill in with their answers to the custom question.
Dropdown: With this option, you'll provide answers that appear in a dropdown menu for volunteers to select from.
Checkbox: This one provides options with checkboxes for the volunteers to answer.
Radio Button: Similar to the checkboxes, this one provides options with buttons for volunteers to answer.
File Upload: This is particularly useful if you want to ask volunteers to upload pictures from the opportunity!
Question: Write the question as you want it to appear to the volunteer.
Options: This field only appears when you select Dropdown, Checkbox, or Radio Button question types. Enter each possible answer on a separate line.
Required: Toggle On to require volunteers to answer the question when submitting hours.
Show to volunteers when they log: Use the dropdown to select when the volunteer encounters the question.
Any hours entries: The question appears for any hour type they submit.
Individual hours only: The question only appears when the volunteer submits an Individual hour.
Team hour entries only: The question only appears when the volunteer submits hours for their Team.
Plus-one hours; The question only appears when the volunteer submits a plus-one hour.
Click Save Custom Question to finish.
Please note that there is no way to allow volunteers to backdate their hours.
Hours Approval
Here you can establish how you want hours to be approved. You can set them up to be automatically approved when the volunteers submit them or to require them to be manually reviewed and approved by a manager.
Go to Settings > Hours and scroll to the Hours Approval section.
Make your selections and click Update Settings to save.
Hours submitted require approval: Selecting this option means a manager must manually review and approve the submitted hours.
Hours submitted are automatically approved: Selecting this option means the hours are automatically approved when the volunteer submits them.
Check-in Kiosk
Here you can set up the welcome message that volunteers encounter when checking in at the kiosk. Be sure to click Update Settings to save your changes.
