Question

Photo of Brandon Fuchs

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Volunteer Check In

3

When Setting up check in for our volunteers what is the best way of setting up the schedule when you have multiple serving teams your volunteers can join for the day which allow a more open house drop in and serve for an hour or serve for more experience. Is there a way to have allow a daily check in and check out and then have it track the total time volunteered based on check in and check out times? 

  • Photo of Michael Garrison

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    Brandon,

    I've developed exactly this routine before for a volunteer organization. So I know how much you need to set up, please let me know whether you're running at least version 6.7 of Rock, and whether having them check out using their phone number in the same way as they check in would be acceptable, or how you'd like the check out to be facilitated (selecting names from a list, automatically after a certain time, etc)

    Have you already got a 24x7 check in group set up that you want to use for this?

  • Photo of Brandon Fuchs

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    Hi Michael,

    I am running the most current version of Rock 6.9. I was planning to have them check in by name simply because that's what they are used to although I am not against the use of the phone number. With that being said I was hoping that they could check out searching for themselves again or selecting name from a list of those checked in to that serving area and then checking out and that the time served would be captured based on the check in and out times.  We have volunteer slots of 2 hours although some of our volunteers faithfully serve longer depending on their roles within the ministry. Others because of other obligations are unable to make it the full 2 hours so checking out automatically doesnt work. Have you set it up previously to also generate a report of those who did not check out but checked in as I have found that this happens from time to time and would need a way for serving team leaders and staff to see such information so that they can go in an check the people out based on the time they left. I would like to use this within our compassion center and volunteer information is critical with some of our donors and a few Grants we get when it comes to food partnerships. 

  • Photo of Michael Garrison

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    Checking in by name would mean building a lot of custom stuff- let's stick with the built-in Rock checkin mechanisms for now (Phone number)

    Start off with a review of the "Checking out Check-in" manual https://www.rockrms.com/Rock/BookContent/10/102 

    You'll want to pay particular attention to "Beyond Children's Check-in" - you'll see that "Serving Teams" are (nearly) configured out of the box to allow members to check in as they serve. You just need to set up a schedule and location to assign the appropriate group(s), if your groups are already of type "Serving Team".

    That's check-in taken care of.


    There are two options for checking out- one is simply ticking "Enable check-out" in the configuration per https://www.rockrms.com/Rock/BookContent/10/102#manualcheckoutversion6.7, at which point they can use the same kiosk/tablet/whatever as you set up for checkin, to check themselves out again, using the same process as when they checked in. It's very straightforward and understandable to your volunteers.

    Alternately, if you want them to be able to pick their name from a list of everyone who is presently checked in, you can follow the steps outlined in this article: http://shouldertheboulder.com/Article?id=557 - it's slightly outdated in that it was published before Rock had a manual check out option, but otherwise still works perfectly.


    Finally, for tracking the total time they served, I've found it easiest to put a Dynamic Data block on a page (for instance, on the main dashboard page) where you want to track your volunteer hours. Note that this will give you a "running total" of the current hours, rather than tracking hours served over time. If you want a graph instead of a total, we can talk about metrics.

    In the "Query" portion of the Block Settings, add this:

    DECLARE @CutoffDate AS [DateTime] = '2017-07-01';
SELECT
    (1.0*SUM(DATEDIFF(mi,[StartDateTime],[EndDateTime])))/60 "manhours"
    , @CutoffDate "date"
FROM
    [Attendance]
WHERE
    [DidAttend]=1
    AND [EndDateTime] IS NOT NULL
    AND [GroupId] = 762
    AND [StartDateTime] > @CutoffDate

    Now, the GroupId I was using in this example was 762: you'll need to replace this number with the ID of the group you're actually wanting to track. Also you can change the cutoff date in the first line.

    In the "Formatted Output" portion of the Block Settings, use this:

    <table class="col-md-4 col-xs-12" style="background-color:#FFF;border:1px solid black;height:8em;">
    <tr>
        <td width="40%" style="text-align:center;">
            <i class="fa fa-group fa-5x"></i>
        </td>
        <td width="60%" style="padding-right:2em;">
            {% assign size = rows | Size %}
            To date, <span class="label label-success">{% for row in rows %}{{ row.manhours | Format:'#,##0.00'}}{% if size < 1 %}0{% endif %}</span> manhours have been volunteered since {{ row.date | Date:'MMMM yyyy' }}{% endfor %}
        </td>
    </tr>
</table>
    The result should be a box that looks something like this:

    What do you think of that approach?

    • Michael Garrison

      Michael Garrison

      Hey, I just found a note in the docs that you CAN enable search by name in Rock's check-in (and check-out) process...that'll enable you to keep that part of the experience familiar, and still take advantage of Rock's powerful check-in feature like I was talking about above.

      • Brandon Fuchs

        Brandon Fuchs

        HI Michael. I am just getting back to this particular project after a busy few months and hoping to have it complete and implemented before the holiday season. I definitely like the total for the group as mentioned above however I am also looking for individual totals where this can be accessed from each individual's user profile. I would also like to eventually have the ability to put in volunteer hours after the fact should they forget to check in similar to adding a gift. Eventually I would like to be able to run a report similar to the giving statement on demand that would list all the serving dates and total hours for each day and to date for that individual. We find that a lot of our middle school and high school students who are serving need documentation for their schools to satisfy different requirements. This would also be helpful when working with community service volunteers who come to assist us with our compassion ministry.