Preparing Campaigns to Record Volunteer Hours

Depending on the kind of volunteer activity you want to record, you may create a specific campaign for Volunteer Hours or you may tag them to an existing campaign like a Direct Mail where they have assisted with getting your mail out the door.

Regardless of what you choose to do there are a couple of ways to record their hours.

We will look first at using an existing campaign where a Schedule is required.  This is useful for Casinos, where a Gaming campaign has been set up for a one-time activity.

The campaign will use the campaign type GM for gaming. We will be placing all gaming dollars received during the year in this campaign. One of the activities will be a Casino where the charity needs to provide volunteers to run the event.

We begin by looking at what jobs we will need. Jobs are recorded in the Lookup Tables under Campaign Events.  We recommend prefixing related job types so they can be easily found when needed.

Eg:  Cas Banker, Casino: Chip Runner, Cas: Count Room, Cas: Manager, etc.  Keep in mind these are all of 25 characters in length.

Once the jobs have been defined we can go to the Gaming campaign and in the Profile we can enter a schedule.

Go to the Gaming Campaign and click on Profile. The Events tab is where a schedule of events can be created. Once the schedule is ready volunteers who have agreed to help can be assigned to the various jobs.

Building the Schedule

Assigning Volunteers

Using the Volunteer menu, select Assign Volunteers

The following window will appear. It is populated with records from the Private Table where Volunteer has been checked.

Volunteers can be selected one at a time and assigned to the jobs they have agreed to perform.

Where there is a time issue the hours at the bottom of the window can be modified to reflect the time the volunteer is available.

The Reports menu offers Volunteer Reports which can be printed or saved as a PDF file so volunteers know their time slots.

Note the various ways the report can be ordered: by date, by volunteer by event, by campaign, by sequence or by name.

Last by not least, when the evening is over and no further changes are made to the schedule as all volunteers showed up, we can Update to Master. This will track first and last year volunteered as well as the number of hours given in the current year.

In appreciation for the help provided by the volunteers for the Casino, we can now thank them using the Q-Xpress Volunteer Menu:

If there are volunteers who participated by were not scheduled, the Event Hours area is ideal to include the time they contributed. Please check out Event Hours.