Gravity Forms
+ Volunteer Hours Log & Milestones

Many charities, schools, clubs and churches collect volunteer hours with a Gravity Forms form, then spend hours turning the entries into numbers. The Gravity Forms Volunteer Hours Log & Milestones add-on turns that form into a real hours log: checked hours, an approval step, totals you can hand to a funder and milestones that thank your volunteers at the right moment.

Volunteers log their time as a number of hours or as a start and end time, with the activity date and the program they helped. Your server works the hours out again, rounds them to 5, 15 or 30 minutes and checks your rules: the most hours in one entry, no future dates, the oldest date allowed. A value changed in the browser is refused. Coordinators approve or reject logs from an approval queue or the entry screen, with a note for the volunteer, and short logs can be approved automatically.

Only approved hours count. The Totals screen shows hours by volunteer, by program and by month, quarter or year in your site’s time zone, filtered by form, program and dates, and exports as CSV. Milestones such as 25, 50 and 100 hours send your Gravity Forms notification once per volunteer, with a link to a printable certificate. Volunteers see their own total on a My volunteer hours page when logged in or through a signed link that shows nobody else’s hours. Merge tags such as {volunteer:total} and {volunteer:certificate_url} go into any notification. For Gravity Forms 2.9 and newer.

When a volunteer sends the form, your server reads the posted values the way Gravity Forms does, works the hours out from the Hours field or the start and end times, applies your rounding and checks your limits and dates. The result is written into the entry before Gravity Forms saves it, together with the volunteer’s e-mail, name, program, activity date and an approval status. Coordinators approve or reject logs; each approval adds the hours to the volunteer’s total and checks the milestones, and a milestone that is passed for the first time sends your notification with a signed certificate link. Totals are worked out from the stored hours each time a report or a volunteer page opens, in your site’s time zone. Everything happens on your own server — the add-on makes no outside HTTP request beyond the licence and update checks.