Lafayette Urban Ministry is a nonprofit organization, made up of more than 45 Christian churches, that provides social services to children and families in the Greater Lafayette, IN area. Their mission is to restore hope and human dignity to those in poverty. They were already using FileMaker to store records, but they knew that they weren’t using it to its full potential. After tracking their volunteers’ hours by paper for many years, decided they wanted to incorporate that into their existing system. DB Services built a custom module in FileMaker so they could track volunteer time entries, generate reports, and gain better visibility of their data.

The Challenge

Lafayette Urban Ministry relies on thousands of volunteers each year to support their many programs and events. All those volunteer hours were tracked with paper forms. Often, volunteers would request records of the number of hours they volunteered, which meant the staff had to spend time sifting through papers to find the information. They knew there was a better way to track volunteer hours than on paper forms. 

The Solution

Lafayette Urban Ministry already had a FileMaker system for their records, so DB Services continued building within their existing system. They created a module to track volunteer time entries and gave them the ability to run reports from them. They could now easily send volunteers their tracked hours, and they were even able to break it down by date and program or event. This makes things simple and convenient not only for the volunteers, but for the employees, as well. All their information is now in one, easy-to-access location.

The Results

This solution saves Lafayette Urban Ministry employees hours of going through volunteer time tracking papers and significantly reduces human error. They now have visibility of hours by program and by volunteer, where they had no historical data before. The time tracking module and reports have been a huge success and they are excited to use the insights from that data to continue to grow their volunteer programs.