How a Little League Tracks, Manages, and Rewards Volunteers
Corona Little League is a progressive community-oriented sports organization structured like a traditional nonprofit. The Little League is a network of hundreds of children and families coming together to practice and play the game of baseball. Running mostly on the help of volunteers, Corona Little League initially used Track it Forward as a mechanism to reward volunteers. “We needed a good way to quantitatively measure and reward volunteers for the work that they’ve done,” says Board President and CEO Eric Schultheiss.
Almost immediately after implementing Track it Forward, Eric noticed something interesting. “One of the fringe benefits we found from the very beginning was that there was a competitive nature that arose out of the volunteers. They wanted to actually do more to compete with their peers,” says Schultheiss.
They previously used a Google spreadsheet to track hours. It was flexible but a little cumbersome and not mobile. Additionally, a huge amount of time was consumed in building reports to come up with the numbers they needed on a regular basis.
One of their favorite Track it Forward features is the simple graph of the top 10 volunteers. It’s nice to login and immediately see who’s contributed the most as well as who has contributed most recently. They also use the custom filter and sort features in the report generating dashboard, selecting different time periods and different activity types. They even use Track it Forward as a way to track paid employees, so they use filters to sort paid versus unpaid tasks.
"The event scheduling feature has been a huge time-saver for us already. I think it's going to be a huge tool in allowing us to schedule some of these larger scale events and allow people to select what it is they would exactly like to do during those events," notes Eric.
Schultheiss has ambitious plans for putting their volunteer time tracking data to good use. Thier ultimate goal is to be able to look at the total number of hours across all categories, and from that be able to communicate value to their sponsors. “We want to use the data to encourage sponsors to contribute more, because then they can see concretely how much their information is getting seen in the community. We want to show them that there is proof of a tangible marketing asset,” says Eric.
The Little League also wants to roll out a new incentive system for rewarding volunteers with reduced fees as well as certificates or coupons for certain volunteer hour milestones. The idea is that by working a certain number of hours, they get a certificate or coupon for goods, services, or other prizes for a certain number of hours of work. Hopefully this will show the benefit and the value of volunteering, motivating everyone to volunteer more and contribute to a thriving organization.
“Track it Forward is a great tool, and the price is right,” says Eric. Schultheiss has been on the Board of Directors at Corona Little League for 10 years, holding the position as Board President and CEO for the past 4 years. He manages and coordinates all of the activities of the Board of Directors, and plays a large role in coordinating staff and volunteers, managers, and coaches. The favorite part of his job is seeing kids on the field playing with their Mom or Dad and enjoying their time out there, and that makes it all worth it.