Prompt for alternate ID in module for recording anonymous hours for users who don't want accounts

Not all volunteers want to create an account with GetConnected to pursue volunteer opportunities they hear about through the grapevine or other promotional channels, but they still want to contribute their time, and their hours need to be recorded for reporting to organizational leadership and funders.

To accommodate the inclinations of these volunteers while maintaining accurate records of total hours contributed to the program by volunteers, whether or not they choose to create accounts with GetConnected, many agency managers maintain records of hours contributed by other means, including spreadsheets and competitor products like Better Impact and Volgistics. The end result is that, since hours are tracked elsewhere, they are not tracked on Get Connected. Agency Managers on GetConnected have little incentive to do duplicate reporting, and rely on GetConnected simply as a supplement to their recruitment efforts on other platforms like Idealist.org and Volunteer Match.

Agency Managers can create dummy accounts and register for the needs to facilitate tracking of hours in the current system, but this is a labor intensive process unsustainable for organizations with large programs, especially if the number of volunteers is either large or highly variable. Similarly, Agency Managers can theoretically create accounts on behalf of their volunteers, but in addition to being as labor intensive as creating dummy accounts, this directly violates the request of the volunteer.

Agency Managers can report hours logged anonymously, which allows Agency Managers to report on hours contributed to their program more accurately on the aggregate, but prevents "anonymous volunteers" from being adequately recognized when they achieve important milestones, which is key to volunteer retention and development. Not wishing to create an account on GetConnected is not synonymous with wishing to volunteer anonymously for most volunteers, and many agency managers want to track the contributions of volunteers, whether or not that volunteer chooses to have an account on GetConnected. This puts many agency managers in the position of maintaining separate records for volunteer hours rendering logging hours in GetConnected redundant entirely.

Prompting for an alternate ID in the Anonymous Hours module would allow Agency Managers to passively record volunteer hours and provide a unique identifier for volunteers who don't wish to create an account. Many agencies operate CRMs that assign ID numbers to donors/volunteers, which would allow Agency Managers to associate volunteer hours contributed with the volunteer who contributed them for their purposes, eliminating the need for duplicate record keeping. Agency Managers recording their hours in GetConnected would mean that the information in GetConnected on completed referrals and hours contributed by volunteers in a particular service area would be more accurate, where currently volunteer hours contributed to organization through GC are drastically undercounted, diminishing the apparent value of GetConnected to program leadership and funders.