Notify organization of individual hours logged - for verification

Posted over 7 years ago by Lucy Schaich

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Lucy Schaich

I submitted a comment similar to this on another post: Validating Volunteer Hours, but wanted to reiterate here as well - since it has come up again for us.

It would also be great if there was an option to add "individual" hours that may not be associated with an opportunity - but are associated with an organization on our site.

Many volunteers are tracking hours for positions with partner organizations that are not being currently recruited for as a need. The organization contact could be notified that hours had been submitted that require verification.

When teens print out their volunteer resume - they will need to have all of their hours showing up as verified - not pending - in order to receive their awards. Right now I don't see a way for them to do this with individual hours.

PLUS - our organizations are not aware of the hours being logged on their behalf.

Maybe just adding another question like the one already there:

Are these hours in reference to a listing on this site for an: Opportunity/Organization (determines dropdown menu of opportunities or all organizations)

Notification of pending hours timesheets would be sent to primary organization contact.

This has primarily been an issue for our teen users.

I have many organizations who have hours being logged for them who have NO idea of this activity.

Thanks!

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4 Comments

Kelly Flynn posted almost 7 years ago Admin

Hi Michele -

Thanks for your comment! I have added your name and comments to the list of people interested in this feature. We will discuss again in our next enhancements meeting.

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Michele Epifani posted almost 7 years ago

Adding individual hours is a huge feature for us, and we are pushing it to engage more people to track. I do understand that an automatic email for confirmation to an outside organization may violate email regulations. And we do not mind reaching out however, I would like to see some functionality where we as the certifying organization can email them through a notification option. The email would be from us not galaxy. We are doing all of this outside of the site and then going back into approve.

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Lucy Schaich posted over 7 years ago

Thanks Nina. I have been able to approve those individual hours as the site manager, but I think it is important to recognize that volunteers often don't associate with a particular opportunity since they may have already been affiliated with the organization.

As an network hub, our own organization does not host volunteers. It's our agencies who need to have this ability to track the hours of all of their volunteers, regardless of opportunity affiliation. Otherwise they will have hours out there that they know nothing about.

I like the work around idea though and will propose that to some of our agencies who this will most affect.

Thanks again!

Lucy

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Nina Rogers posted over 7 years ago Admin

Hi, Lucy,

Good news! As a site manager, you can approve individual hours from your site manager panel! Because most individual hours that are submitted in our system are not associated with a registered agency, the site manager is the only person who can approve individual hours.

We will be releasing Connect version 2.10 soon, which will include a few changes to the individual hours submission form:

Individual hours will follow the same rules as regular hours regarding pending/active status. So, if regular hours are pending until approved, individual hours will now be marked pending until approved.

You'll have the option of requiring a contact email address for individual hours.

At this time, individual hours cannot be tied to an agency in the sense that the agency will get a notification email to approve individual hours. It works this way because the individual hours feature was designed specifically so that people could log hours that weren't related to the agencies and needs that were already in the system.

I will bring your suggestion up at our next enhancements meeting. In the meantime, would it be possible for an agency to post a generic need such as "Teen Volunteer Opportunities"? If a teen responds to that, they can select it when logging hours, and the agency manager would then get the notification.

Thanks for your suggestion!

Nina

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