Tracking Volunteer Hours

Meg Word

We require parents to do 4 hours a year of Volunteer time.  We need a way to track this in the OnBoard system.  Any ideas?

Sarah Bienvenue

Hi Meg, typically these kinds of things are tracked outside of Enrollment Management, can you tell me how you currently track it?


thanks,

Sarah

Meg Word

We are new to this system.  In RenWeb, we tracked these hours on the parent page.  I don't know enough about where to even look in BB to find where we could track these hours.

Geoffrey Goodfellow

Hi, Meg. 


Our school tracks service/volunteer hours by student, not parent, so our situation may be different than yours.  I've added to the idea bank that we would like some mechanism within the system to track this.  In the meantime, we create a "course" called Service Hours and then enroll all of our students in that one course.   Then, we add a service hour "assignment" to the gradebook and make it worth 10 points because our students need to do 10 hours of volunteering/service each year.   Then, as students report their service hours, we "grade" the assignment and award the corresponding hours.  If they do 5 hours, we change the grade from 0 to 5 all the way up to 10 points or even higher if they do more hours than required.  Then, at any point in time, it easy to see who has completed the requirement, who has not, etc.   The "grade" is visible to parents/students as well, so they can also see the progress.  We hide the "cumulative" grade in the gradebook so that 5/10 hours doesn't translate to a 50% F.  Having an entire course page for service hours also allows you to leverage the bulletin board, topics, and other resources where you can upload service hour handouts, publish upcoming service hour opportunities, etc. and we assign the staff member who tracks the service hours to be the "teacher" of the course.


Hope that helps give one option.  You cannot enroll parents in a class, but perhaps you enroll only the oldest child from each family into the course, and when the parents complete hours, you record for that one student.  

 

Kathy Hannon

We use Custom fields to track student volunteer hours - I am sure you can use for parents also

Katherine Kawaye

Kathy Hannon:

We use Custom fields to track student volunteer hours - I am sure you can use for parents also

Hi Kathy,

Any chance you can show me how you do that with custom fields?  Do you have to keep update it?  

Is it weekly?  Thank you so much! 


Katherine

Kathy Hannon

Screenshot attached - Community Service Hours - The custom fields are located Core>Settings>General settings>Custom fields - Publishable fields.  You can create up to 10 custom fields - you can do a data import (User management) for initial upload (we do this annually for the parking spaces which are assigned via google sheet throughout the summer).  Don't forget to set Profile Access for members you want to see this field - in our case "Student" but you can set to view on the Parent. The Community Service Hours are manually maintained as we receive the student's signed off hours and then this documentations is uploaded to the students Files & Forms tab.  Feel free to email me if you have questions - khannon@htes.org

Nancy Cunningham

Hi Kathy - Your info is very helpful and thanks for the screenshot. We also have a manual process for recording student service hours, but you refer to documentation that is uploaded to the students Files & Forms tab.  Can you elaborate on the documentation itself?  Also, when you create the data import, what category and import type is used? Is it UserManagement > Publishable Custom Field?  Thanks again for your help!

Kathy Hannon

Hi Nancy - Under Bulk Upload>Manage user files, we have a folder "Community Service Hrs" set up with a file name of "Approved Hours"


Then on a student's record on the Files & Forms tab we can upload the pdf of approved hours for reference (see screenshot)

 

Meg Word

Where do you add the Custom Field and how to do you update it?

Bryna Gleich

Meg Word:

Where do you add the Custom Field and how to do you update it?