Volunteering is one of the best ways to obtain a purpose and belonging in life. That’s why it’s considered one of the most effective strategies for promoting employee well-being:
“As the CEO of an organization that creates corporate volunteering programs that are highly regarded by employees, this makes perfect sense to me. Employees involved in our programs tell us they appreciate the opportunity to give back, feel a sense of purpose and build new relationships. People tell us they leave feeling rewarded, invigorated and grateful.” – Leila Saad for Forbes
However, achieving that sense of purpose is rather impossible without actually getting the job done. And for a non-profit business like yours, making sure your volunteers complete the assigned tasks well and invest enough time in work is even more important – it’s the only way to guarantee the longevity of your endeavor and be able to actually fulfill your mission.
That’s where volunteer time tracking can be of tremendous assistance.
It lets you get better control over team performance, be capable of recognizing volunteers’ contributions, and even gather more funding by demonstrating how efficient your business is in delivering the planned projects.
Here we present several handy volunteer time tracking tools that can help your non-profit organization thrive.
10 Best Volunteer Time Tracking Solutions
| actiTIME | VolunteerHub | Get Connected | Volunteer Impact | Track It Forward | |
| Automated time tracking | |||||
| Budget tracking | |||||
| Mobile app | |||||
| Volunteer scheduling | |||||
| Free version for teams |
1. actiTIME
Key features:
- Automated time tracking
- Cost and budget tracking
- In-depth reports
- Mobile app
- Notifications
Giving your volunteers the means to measure their contributions to the project is one of the best ways to motivate them:
“Sometimes a big aim, such as electing a candidate or solving a big social problem, can feel remote. Volunteers need to have personal benchmarks to measure their own progress and know if their work makes a difference. By chunking data so volunteers can track their local contribution to the bigger goal, successful campaigns increase engagement.” – Joe McCannon and Hahrie Han for HBR
Luckily, with actiTIME, making work progress more meaningful and traceable for your volunteers is as easy as pie.
Let’s say you’re running an animal shelter and planning a charity event to collect donations for animals in need. You want to produce custom products (like t-shirts, cups, and pet supplies with your own design) and sell them on a local pop-up market. To attain this big goal, you’ve built a team of talented volunteers, comprised of graphic designers, illustrators, coordinators, and even bakers.
Now, to make certain everyone understands what they are supposed to do and when, you simply need to create a project in your actiTIME account, then add all the associated tasks, set deadlines and priority levels for those tasks, attach any important information to them via comments, and, finally, allocate jobs to the right volunteers:
After that, your volunteers can start to work on the assigned tasks and track the time put into work via a variety of methods: traditional weekly timesheets, the calendar view, a fully automated browser extension, or the mobile app with a convenient stopwatch feature. In other words, they have all the flexibility and freedom to choose a time tracking approach that fits their style best.
When the work is done, they can also run a personal productivity report to measure their contributions in precious hours of their lives and get that sought-after feeling of accomplishment.
As a manager, you can also run reports for your entire volunteer team and compare the time it has actually invested in work to your initial estimates. Besides, in case you set the cost of work and billing rates for tasks in the system, you can make use of the visual budget tracking feature to keep your business resources under better control in real time and with ease.
Pricing:
Free version for up to 3 users.
Paid plans start at $5 per user/month.
You can join actiTIME’s unique program and save 50% off your entire subscription. All of the benefits while only paying half the cost… what gives you a better return on investment than that?
2. VolunteerHub
Key features:
- Comprehensive volunteer management
- Scheduling
- Volunteer database
Today, you can make use of great volunteer time tracking software products designed to manage volunteers and nonprofit projects specifically, and VolunteerHub is one of them. This high-quality tool includes the scheduling, recruitment, and database features and, of course, it incorporates a work hour tracker as well. This way, it streamlines all the essential aspects of volunteer management, from the search process to engagement and follow-up.
As such, VolunteerHub acts mainly as an attendance management system that serves to identify any punctuality issues among volunteers, as well as no-shows. To combat these significant problems, which can easily undermine the overall success of your charity projects if left uncontrolled, VolunteerHub offers automatic reminders that help you keep volunteers in the know of when they’re supposed to be present.
Then, you can analyze time tracking data via reports to understand how engaged and productive your volunteers are. And in case there’s a need to increase volunteer motivation and engagement, the software has a specialized reward and recognition module that lets you introduce a friendly competition into your team of volunteers thanks to leaderboards.
Pricing:
Since VolunteerHub is originally targeted at nonprofits, it doesn’t offer a discounted price for them.
The price for basic version of this volunteer time tracking software with the capacity to manage up to 1,000 volunteers will cost you $143 a month (+ a set-up fee).
VolunteerHub Pro allows you to access up to 2500 active volunteers and costs $288 a month (+ set-up fee).
3. Get Connected
Key features:
- Check-in kiosk
- Scheduling
- Automatic time tracking
- Infographic-like reports
Did you know that the way you manage volunteers directly impacts their intention to keep on participating in volunteering projects as such? According to this study, such positive management practices as reward and recognition, empowerment, and flexible work scheduling are among the major factors contributing to continual volunteering.
It seems that the masterminds behind Get Connected are 100% aware of these latest findings, as well as the best management practices – they’ve created a comprehensive volunteer management platform that incorporates all the tools you need to engage volunteers, make sure they are perfectly aligned with your non-profit’s mission, and stay in control of their efforts without being intrusive.
With Get Connected, your volunteers can track hours automatically and monitor personal productivity results via visual charts and reports. Plus, Get Connected features a mobile time clock kiosk + automatic reminders to keep volunteers in the loop on when they have to check in, which helps to keep tardiness and missed shifts in better check.
Pricing:
Get Connected doesn’t disclose any pricing information on its website. So, to learn the details, you will have to get in touch with the Get Connected team.
Plus, you can always arrange a free product demo to explore all the abovementioned (and many other useful features the software has to offer) in more depth.
4. Volunteer Impact
Key features:
- Training and onboarding
- Robust reports
- Communication
- Scheduling
Volunteer Impact is a comprehensive and multifunctional platform for volunteer management. It allows you to maintain accurate volunteer profiles, train your volunteers, communicate with them online, and, of course, track how much time they’ve spent helping you out.
This software platform supports both manual and automatic time logging. Besides, you can apply it to collect feedback after each volunteer shift and run insightful performance reports to inform decision-making and enhance the use of resources.
According to G2 reviews, users praise Volunteer Impact for its team communication features and self-scheduling tools for volunteers. Besides, it makes it super-easy to log volunteer hours.
However, like pretty much any comprehensive and multifunctional software, Volunteer Impact requires a lot of time to get familiar with. So, get prepared for hours and days of learning before you can start to use this software properly. And if it’s something you’re not looking forward to, you can easily dodge the bullet by opting for a simpler yet still powerful option.
Pricing:
The pricing information is not available.
5. Track It Forward
Key features:
- Volunteer check-in
- App integrations
- Mobile app
- Reports
Track It Forward was created with nonprofits in mind and specializes in volunteer time tracking. The tool aims to take your nonprofit from an organization that’s drowning in paperwork to one that’s digitized and virtually paperless. It helps ease the pain of starting a volunteer time tracking service by offering a base-level system.
On the face of it, Track It Forward has pretty basic functionality that covers all the essentials of volunteer time tracking, communication, and scheduling. And unfortunately, its interfaces have a slightly outdated feel.
With that said, this software still can help you streamline lots of internal processes (like event scheduling, email, and attendance management). And though it looks dim in comparison to other advanced software solutions on our list, Track It Forward can be a great tool for non-profits without any sophisticated management needs.
Pricing:
Track It Forward doesn’t have a discount for nonprofits of a free version.
Its basic plan costs $12 per month for 100 users, and more advanced plans start at $24 per month.
6. Time Doctor
Key features:
- Activity tracking
- Idle time alerts
- Desktop screenshots
- Reports
Managing a remote team of volunteers and want to stay in the know of what they do throughout the day? Time Doctor is a good option to consider in this case.
Time Doctor is not a volunteer time tracking app per se, but an automated employee monitoring platform with all the features such software is supposed to possess: web and app usage tracking, screenshots, inactivity alerts, and anomaly detection.
The main question here: is employee monitoring such a good idea indeed?
Most studies and real-life observations state that it isn’t.
For instance, according to Thiel et al., employee monitoring can actually promote adverse organizational behaviors and rule-breaking among your team members instead of preventing them. In other words, it contributes to the very outcome it is meant to counteract!
On top of that, when you resort to employee monitoring, it’s a sign that you don’t trust your team members (Source). And it’s valid to presume that staff members who don’t feel trusted + enjoy little to no autonomy are not likely to stay satisfied with their jobs for long.
For obvious reasons, some people might not enjoy Time Doctor because of the micromanage-y feel that it gives them. But since you’re dealing with volunteers, you’ll want to be extra careful and respectful of the fact that they’re using personal time to help you. Thus, implementing some of the features of Time Doctor might scare them away. So, instead, consider using a safer alternative.
Pricing:
Time Doctor doesn’t offer a discount for nonprofits. Instead, it has a free 14-day trial that you can cancel at any time.
Subscription prices start at $6.70 per user/month (+ paid add-ons available).
7. TimeCamp
Key features:
- Invoicing
- GPS location tracking
- Visual charts
TimeCamp is similar to Time Doctor. Its feature set serves to increase business productivity and deal with performance issues in remote teams. It lets you take a peek at what everyone is working on at any given moment. Thus, it’s especially helpful for managing those volunteers who work online and across locations.
TimeCamp’s GPS tracking feature might be of great assistance in attendance management.
For instance, when you involve volunteers in such tasks as food delivery or home care services and they are supposed to be on-site at the scheduled time, real-time GPS tracking can help you make sure everything goes as planned without disturbing your volunteers with frequent text messages or phone calls – you can simply look at the screen to see if they are where they are meant to be.
However, considering the risks associated with excess employee monitoring, make sure to carefully measure all the pros and cons of using such a tool as TimeCamp for volunteer time tracking prior to actually purchasing it.
Assuming you don’t want to micromanage your volunteers and make them unnecessarily stressed, you might aim for another solution (like actiTIME).
Pricing:
Free version with limited time tracking functionality.
Paid plans start at $1.49 per user/month.
TimeCamp offers a 30% discount for nonprofits.
8. Volgistics
- Time tracking
- Volunteer database
- Document management
Volgistics is a multifunctional volunteer management software that enables nonprofits to handle their resources more efficiently and effortlessly. It offers a variety of features that turn it into an invaluable tool: time tracking, messaging, volunteer recruiting, and much, much more.
Volgistics provides top-notch customer support. And for those who need some help figuring out how its numerous features work, the Volgistics team carries out live product demos and online training.
On the downside, though, the platform’s interfaces don’t seem modern or intuitive enough. Based on G2 reviews, some users also experience occasional software glitches and have difficulties managing volunteer data because of too many reporting criteria that are hard to navigate.
Pricing:
Volgistics offers a free trial so that nonprofits can see it in action before committing to a paid subscription.
Paid plans start at $9 per 50 volunteers/month.
9. Timecounts
Key features:
- Communication
- Onboarding
- Scheduling
- Reporting
Timecounts is a robust time tracking tool for nonprofits. It is a great asset for any nonprofit organization looking to streamline its operations and better support its volunteers.
Besides being user-friendly, it contains a plethora of handy features, from volunteer recruitment and onboarding to work scheduling and team communication. Moreover, after volunteers submit the worked-out time to Timecounts, you can run different informative reports to keep tabs on progress and analyze the use of resources in depth.
Pricing:
Timecounts offers a free trial, so you can explore all its features risk-free before deciding if it’s the right fit for your needs.
There’s a free version with limited functionality.
Paid plans start at $59 per month.
10. Dovico
Key features:
- Timesheeets
- Costing and billing
- Notifications
- Reports
Dovico is a trustworthy time tracking tool for all sorts of businesses. And as a very user-friendly solution, it makes it easy to keep track of every minute your volunteers invest in work. Besides, it’s of great value in monitoring project expenses and overall progress.
Another great thing about this software is that it provides a great deal of flexibility, allowing users to tailor time tracking functionality to their specific needs. Dovico also offers a number of reports that can be customized to provide valuable insights into your various project operations, including client billing and invoicing.
Pricing:
Dovico doesn’t have a special discount for nonprofit organizations.
It offers a free 30-day trial.
Plans start at $9 per user/month.
Enhance Volunteer Time Tracking with the Best Tools
Now that you’ve seen the top volunteer time tracking solutions in the industry, it’s time to find the right fit for your business. We’ve collected all the information about the benefits of using timesheets in companies of different kinds in this article to motivate you even more.
Afterward, feel free to dive straight into the world of volunteer time tracking with actiTIME – sign up for a free online trial, and we’ll be more than happy to assist you further!
