Why is reporting important?

• To validate our community presence required to attract business and foundation support for our villages, it is important to document the volunteer commitment of our organization's members.
• Knowing both the number of contributed hours and the number of different contributors is essential to demonstrating the strength of our villages.
• Several local companies will make cash contributions to benefit our villages based on the the number of volunteer community-service hours current (and retired) employees make.

What kind of hours should I report about?

In general, almost any activity you do for your village is reportable. However, the set of activities is not the same for all villages, the biggest difference being with time spent fulfilling a village member's request. Because of this variance by village, check your village's Logging page to see what it expects.

What happens to the data I submit?

Each Village (and Villages NW) has a separate, password protected data base that records your data entries. As indicated above, you should record your volunteer hours that benefit a specific village in that village's "account". For example, if you are affiliated with ABC Village, but make a presentation to XYZ Village, you would record those volunteer hours under XYZ Village. Working on a Task Force that benefits all villages? Record that time under VillagesNW.

You are encouraged to record your volunteer hours soon after you give them, thus avoiding the hassle of keeping a running total yourself; let the computer keep track of the math! Be sure you don't double count; only record that volunteer hour in one place!

Generating reports

The volunteer hours system also contains a password-protected report generation capability. Each village's data has a unique password. When granted access, reports showing individual contributions and total contributions by category can be generated. The report type(s) and month(s) by the report are selectable. Report output can be copied and pasted into a spread sheet for further analysis. Individual data records also can be reviewed, edited or deleted as necessary to correct erroneous data.

Background and Program Assistance

In February 2015 Viva Village developed a small web-enabled data base application to support gathering reports from our volunteers of the hours they were contributing to our village's formation efforts. When several other villages indicated interest in getting a copy of the program, the developer revised the program to support multiple villages rather than trying to train multiple admins and support multiple variants at multiple hosts. The scripts are written PHP and use a separate SQLite database for each village. The hours program gathers data from volunteers, and the reports program processes the data. In November 2021, the programs were moved from the Viva Village website to the Villages Northwest Web site.

Please report any problems you encounter with the programs to [email protected]. Persons responsible for report generation should request information on passwords and configuration options from the same address.