Tracking Your Volunteering Hours

As an adult volunteer you give far more time to Scouting than any register captures — the weekly meeting is only part of it. There's the planning beforehand, the admin afterwards, the training weekend, the kit run on a Saturday morning. My volunteering hours gives you a simple, dated record of all of it: the time counted automatically from events you attend, plus anything else you add yourself. You can export the whole record whenever you need to show the hours you've given — for a role application, a long-service nomination, an external award, or just your own records.

Where to find this#

Open My volunteering hours from the user menu — your name or photo in the top-right corner — right next to Profile. It's your own personal record, so it lives with your account rather than in the group sidebar.

It appears for adult volunteers — anyone with a leader, admin or Network role. Young Leaders have their own separate tracker, covered in Tracking the Young Leader Award.

How your hours add up#

Your total is made up of two kinds of hours:

• Counted automatically — whenever you're marked present at an event, Scoutworks counts the time between its start and end as volunteering hours. No effort on your part.
• Added by you — for everything that doesn't show up on the calendar: programme planning, admin, a training course, the residential you helped run. Adding these by hand is what makes your total honest — attendance on its own undercounts adult volunteering badly.

The two simply add together. This is your own record: nobody signs it off, and there's no target to reach. Scoutworks marks the figures as self-reported, because that's exactly what they are.

Adding hours by hand#

Click Add hours and fill in:

Save, and it joins your record straight away. You can edit or delete anything you've added by hand whenever you like. Hours counted automatically from events stay read-only — they follow the event itself, so if its times change, your hours stay correct.

Choosing a date range#

Both your own record and the group report have a free date picker, so you can total your hours for any period that matters — a term, a year, or the run-up to a deadline. Leave it open to see everything.

Exporting your hours#

Click Export CSV to download your record as a spreadsheet. Every session is listed on its own row — the date, the hours, whether it came from an event or you added it, and your note — so it stands on its own as evidence. Open it in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets, or attach it straight to an application.

What leaders and admins see#

Volunteering hours aren't only for you. Leaders and admins can see how the load is spread across the group — not to rank anyone, but to spot who's carrying a lot and might need a hand before they burn out.

There are two places for this, and both are read-only: a leader can see a volunteer's hours but can't change them.

On a volunteer's Team profile#

Open Team, click a volunteer, and their profile includes a Volunteering hours section — their total, the split between event hours and added hours, and how many sessions. It's the quick way to check in on one person.

The Volunteer Hours report in Insights#

Open Insights and choose the Volunteer Hours tab to see the whole group at a glance — every volunteer, their total hours, and when they were last active. Sort it however helps, set a date range, and export the lot as a CSV. Click any row to drop straight into that person's Team profile.

The report is deliberately not a leaderboard: figures are marked self-reported, and it's framed around who might need support — not who's "top".

What's next#

• Managing Your Profile — your personal details, photo and preferences.
• Tracking the Young Leader Award — the separate hours and award tracker for Explorer Young Leaders.
• Finding Leader and Volunteer Information — view a fellow volunteer's profile and contact details in Team.