Sara Ramsay
As a part of our 2019 website updates, The Mountaineers added a new My Volunteer Hours section to the My Profile page. This page will show all activities, events, and lodge stays with associated volunteer hours, as well as any self-reported hours. Members can also filter, search, download, and print a selection of their volunteer hours. This can be useful when submitting volunteer hours to be matched through employer programs.
How are volunteer hours tracked?
Volunteer hours can be associated with activities, events, or lodge stays. Hours are entered on program rosters, and once saved, will appear on each member’s My Volunteer Hours profiles.
Not sure how to add volunteer hours for your program? Learn a few tips to making recording hours for activities, events, or lodge stays a breeze!
Volunteer hours cannot be added to course rosters. Please be sure to record volunteer time on each course-related activity. Additional time may be reported through self-reported hours.
How do I self-report hours?
Members can add volunteer hours that are not captured on activity, event, or lodge stay rosters from their My Volunteer Hours profile. This is most commonly used to report committee or course admin work.
Enter all required and relevant information, then hit save to add this instance of volunteering to your profile. Please do not re-enter hours that should have been captured on an activity, event, or lodge stay roster.
Here's an example:
Let’s look at the snapshot from Becca’s volunteer profile, shown above with permission. In April and May 2019, Becca spent 24.5 hours volunteering for the Seattle Canyoning Committee. That included 3.5 hours at a committee meeting (captured through the event she created to schedule her meeting) and 6 hours at a practice session (also captured through an event), plus 10 hours spent scouting a new location for the course and 5 hours of general committee administration (both added as self-reported instances).
Why isn’t all of my volunteer time displayed?
The My Volunteer Hours page only shows activities, events, and lodge stays with associated volunteer hours, as well as any self-reported hours. It will not show activities, events, and lodge stays with no associated hours, even if your role was as a volunteer. If you think you’re missing a volunteer instance, check your My Activities profile to see if there are hours associated with that activity. If not, and you’re not able to make the change yourself (as is the case after activities are closed) please email info@mountaineers.org for support!
If you’ve spent time volunteering outside of an activity, event, or lodge stay, you’ll need to self-report those hours using the “Add Volunteer Hours” button.
Who can see My Volunteer Hours profile?
Currently, this page is only visible to you! In the future, the page will be available to all logged-in activity leaders. This will help committee chairs and admin have more visibility into their volunteers’ capacity and bandwidth.
Additionally, staff can run volunteer hours reports through our Salesforce database. If you would like to see a report of hours for your course, committee, or branch, please email info@mountaineers.org.
How should I track my volunteer time?
Please consider the following guidelines as you record volunteer hours:
- The primary leader of an activity should record all hours spent preparing for an event/activity, including things like route research, emails back and forth with participants, travel to the trail head, etc. Record these in the activity before you close it. Leaders undoubtedly put in more time than assistant leader(s) or instructors, and you can manually edit hours on your roster for individual volunteers.
- For overnight trips, do not record hours spent sleeping.
- When self-reporting hours, be careful not to re-enter hours that have already been reported or should be reported on an activity, event, or lodge roster.
Why do volunteer hours matter?
Recording your hours as a volunteer is important for a number of reasons!
Reward & Recognition
In the future, The Mountaineers hopes to use volunteer hours to administer our annual volunteer reward and recognition programs. This is a more fair and accurate than our current system, but we first need to establish a strong baseline. Our hope is to start awarding the Super Volunteer badge based on hours in 2021! As always, we will seek additional input from our Branch Chairs to identify volunteers who may have incomplete information in our database.
Matching Hours
Many employers will match their employee’s hours with a donation to that nonprofit. The My Volunteer Hours profile makes it easy to print a report of your hours to submit to your employer! Read more on our blog.
Course Applications
Students applying to take advanced courses (ex: Intermediate Alpine Climbing) often need to submit a report of their volunteer hours. Those members can now track all of their volunteer time in one convenient place!
Volunteer Story
The Mountaineers is founded on the principle of volunteerism, and accurate volunteer hours paints a stronger picture of our programs for prospective donors and grant funders.
Do I need to do anything now?
Help us establish our baseline by keeping accurate track of your hours starting in 2019! A good way to get familiar with this new system is to go back and update your My Volunteer Hours profile for the 2018-19 fiscal year. The more accurate information we have captured in our system, the faster we’ll be able to establish a baseline.
