Measure and Share Your Volunteering Impact

[Alicia_Schmidt]

Measure and Share Your Volunteering Impact

Track what you’ve done and tell the story.

📍 Where you are

Your first activities are happening and your team is volunteering. Now you need to capture what’s being achieved so you can report to leadership, improve the program, and tell a story that builds momentum. This module keeps it simple — a Google Form and a quarterly review is all you need to start.

Measurement is what turns a good program into a growing one. Without data, you can’t report to leadership, improve the program, or tell your story of impact. A Google Form and a quarterly review is all you need to start.

First, decide why you’re tracking. Do you want metrics to promote externally? Stories to excite employees? Data for a Dollars for Doers program? Track what you’ll actually use.

Employee-Side Metrics

Metric	What It Tells You	How to Collect
Total volunteer hours	Scale of program — your headline number	Google Form after each activity
Participation rate	% of unique employees who volunteered at least once — best culture metric	Cross-reference form with headcount
Hours per employee	Average engagement depth	Total hours ÷ headcount
Repeat participation	Are people coming back? High repeat = program people love	Track names across events
Employee satisfaction	Qualitative feedback — what did they get out of it?	Post-event survey, 3 questions max

Community-Side Metrics — Ask Your Nonprofit Partner

• Approximately how many people benefited from today’s volunteer activity?
• What did our team accomplish today, and how does that translate to your broader program goals or community impact?
• What would have been difficult or impossible to accomplish without this volunteer support, and what does that make possible for the community you serve?
• What did this volunteer group do particularly well and what’s one thing that would make future volunteer groups even more effective?
• Is there a specific way we could support your work in the future?

Volunteer Activity Log — Google Form Fields

Employee Fills In	You Track Separately
Name	Running total of hours by quarter
Date of activity	Participation rate (unique employees)
Nonprofit organization name	Orgs supported (running list)
Type: group / individual / skills-based / virtual	Community metrics from nonprofit partner
Hours contributed	VTO hours used vs. allotted
Would you do this again? Y/N	Notable stories for storytelling
Is there a story or comment you’d like to share about your experience?

🤖 AI DRAFT PROMPT

Build our Volunteer Activity Log in Google Forms

Use this to generate step-by-step instructions for setting up your volunteer tracking form in Google Forms — no technical experience needed.

Copy this prompt into your preferred AI assistant (like Claude or Gemini), then fill in the [brackets]:

I need to set up a Volunteer Activity Log in Google Forms for our company's Pledge 1% volunteer program. Please give me step-by-step instructions to build the form, including the exact field names, field types, and any answer options to include.

The form should collect the following from employees after each volunteer activity:
- Name
- Date of activity — date picker
- Nonprofit organization name — short text
- Type of volunteering — multiple choice: Group volunteer day / Individual VTO / Skills-based / Virtual
- Hours contributed — number field
- Would you do this again? — multiple choice: Yes / No / Maybe
- Any comments or stories you'd like to share? — paragraph text (optional)

Once responses are collected in the linked Google Sheet, I also need to track the following separately. Please tell me how to set up these calculated columns:
- Running total of volunteer hours by quarter
- Participation rate (number of unique employees who have submitted at least one entry)
- Running list of unique nonprofit organizations supported
- VTO hours used vs. VTO hours allotted per employee (assume each employee gets [X] hours per year)
- A column to flag notable stories for follow-up

Please write the instructions clearly enough for someone with no spreadsheet experience. Include any formulas I'll need.

Reporting Cadence

When	Audience	What to Share
After each event	Slack / team	Photos, hours, brief recap — keep it celebratory
Quarterly	CEO + all-hands	Hours YTD, participation rate, 1–2 impact stories
Annually	Whole company + public	Year totals, top volunteers, community impact, next year’s goals

💡 PRO TIP

The 50-person threshold: Under 50 employees, Google Forms + a spreadsheet is enough. Over 50, look at Benevity, YourCause, Deed, Goodera and other paid platforms. Don’t invest in software before you need it.

Setting Up Your Volunteer Program — Final Review Checklist

Before you launch, take a quick review and make sure you’ve got what you need to integrate a culture of volunteering at your company:

✅ Volunteer Program Launch Checklist
☐	Volunteer goals set and tied to business reporting
☐	VTO policy drafted, reviewed, and published
☐	Volunteer formats determined and tracking tool set up
☐	Volunteer ambassador program defined and ambassador(s) identified
☐	First nonprofit partner onboarded and first activity co-created
☐	Google Form tracking set up and shared with all employees
☐	Headline metric established — the one number you’ll report at year-end

Your volunteering program is live. Now let’s put your financial resources to work.

Next: Phase 3 — Profit Pledge →