Volunteer / In-kind Contribution good practices

[bchoc]

Hello, All,

I read on the CiviContribute page (http://civicrm.org/civicontribute) that CiviContribute can be used to track volunteer hours and in-kind donations.  Searching through the forum, I read this post (http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,1061.0.html) about using 1.8 for Volunteer hours.

My interest is piqued, as an organization I work with is tracking these things on spreadsheets, but it's not obvious to me what the best way to mold CiviContribute into tracking non-monetary things like time and objects would be.

I thought I'd ask out there, who is doing this and what practices are working and what is ineffective?

bc

[Dave Greenberg]

Hopefully others will chime in with "real-world" experience... Meanwhile, the configuration steps I've used to demo this are:

* Create additional Contribution Types (e.g. "In-kind", "Volunteer Hours", etc.)
* Create Custom Data Group(s) which are "used for" Contributions >> In-kind  and/or Contributions >> Volunteer Hours
* Add fields you would need to add data to the contribution records for these "transactions". Example - for In-kind you might just need a "Note" field... "List Contributed Items". Or you might want to get quantities by "type" if you're soliciting specific things.

That's all you need to record these "offline". You can then use Find Contributions to seach by contribution type - and export details of your in-kind contributions etc.

If you want folks to "contribute online"...
* Create a profile with the custom contribution field(s) the contributor will need to complete
* Create an Online Contribution page. In the Contribution Amounts form, you'll un-check "Execute real-time monetary transactions". You'll probably want to just enable the "Other Amounts" field - and include instructions in the page "Introduction" telling folks to enter the market value of their contribution in the "Contribution Amount" field.
* Add your profile with custom contribution field(s) to the contribution page.

If you wind up using some or all of these suggestions - PLEASE post a description of what you did and how it worked for your organization in the "Showcase" section of this forum.

[eggtart]

Hi Dave,

Some contributions may have a defined quantity and expiry date and we want to be able to track their usage.  For instance, a magazine may donate 10 ads expiring in 6 months.  And we want to track how many have we used, generate reports of offers that are about to expire, etc etc.  Can we do that using the approach that you have just described?

Thanks

[Dave Greenberg]

You can certainly define custom fields for these attributes (and as noted, define different set of fields by "contribution type"). You can export the contributions with their custom field values - which would allow you to identify "about to expire" offers. Or you could build a custom report and / or custom search if you have access to some php / sql skills.

Tracking "how many used" seems like a tougher nut to crack. You staff could potentially just go to a contribution record and decrement the counter field - but that seems pretty unfriendly. I think you'd probably need to build an extension / module to provide an interface for this.

[jakecivi]

To revive an old thread - I have an added requirement - it is tracking in-kind contributions towards event fees. In this case, a contribution type (or financial type now) is not the appropriate way to do it, as the financial type describes all contributions towards an event. The way to go in this case would be the payment instrument, as it applies to individual contributions towards event fees, although some care would need to be taken later in terms of reporting, to make sure that in-kind contributions don't get counted as revenue for an event. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

This is related to a discussion topic I started about trading volunteer credit for event payment: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php?topic=34612