So you have found and claimed a mission... You may be at the point of wishing to submit a report. Let's firstly discuss some of the reasons you may wish to submit a report.

You wish to log volunteering time

You wish to submit an expense claim

You wish to flag an issue or raise an action to your charity

You wish to complete a mission and remove it from your ongoing list

Essentially you use the report feature to communicate with your charity with any information relevant to that mission. You can submit volunteering time, any calls made, client happiness (where relevant), any issues and any feedback in text form.

Please note that to submit an expense claim, you must submit a report also.

To submit a report, open the app, open the mission you wish to submit a report for which should be in your Ongoing missions list. If it is not here, either you are not approved or have been removed from the mission, we recommend contacting your charity in this case.

Once in the mission, you should see a selection of buttons at the top. One of these should be "Report", press this.

This will open the report entry page. Here are the options and what they indicate. Note that if you do not see one or more of these options then do not worry, the reports are set up by the charity based on the information they wish to collect.

Did you have any calls?

If you are mentoring, befriending or generally interacting with an individual as part of this mission, you may have had a call with them. If so, select this option and add the call time. Note that volunteering time means the total time spent volunteering including any calls. For example, if you dropped shopping off for a client, you may have had a 10-minute chat on the phone and spent 30 minutes collecting and delivering. In such an instance your call time is 10 minutes and volunteering time is 40 minutes.

How many minutes did you spend volunteering in total?

Make sure to capture the total time spent, if you had any other actions or activities as part of the report you are logging, include that time in the total. However do not duplicate time, if you spent 60 minutes last week and 60 minutes this week. If you reported your 60 minutes last week in another report, do not include it in the next one.

How was the client feeling?

If you interacted with a client and had a gauge of how they were doing, log it here.

Details

Basically anything you would like your charity to know about your volunteering, your feedback or any issues, be sure to include full details here.

Does this report require any action from Example Charity?

You can flag an action or a concern for someone's wellbeing. We would advise revisiting any safeguarding information you have been provided by your charity but if something didn't feel right, use this flag. Better to be safe than sorry!

Would you like this report to be kept private?

Any other current or future volunteers on this mission will not be able to see this report. This is helpful if you discussed something that you or the client would wish to be kept private from other volunteers.

Would you like to add receipts?

If you have an expense you would like to request reimbursement for, this is the option you must select. We will go into more detail in the next section.

Should this mission be closed?

In one-off missions where you do something and then it is done, such as perhaps shopping, an event or a shift then use this option. However, please be aware that this could archive the mission so if it is the type of thing you need to come back to at a future date then do not close.

Firstly, ensure when you submit the report you select the "Would you like to add receipts?" option.

"But I submitted my report for my volunteering time and feedback but didn't include my expense"

In this situation, submit a report leaving feedback blank and 0 minutes of volunteering time. Just select the "Would you like to add receipts?" option.

Once you submit the report, the below page should open on the app.

Add a photo

Here you can submit any evidence such as receipts or train tickets.

Amount to claim

This is the value of the claim you are making.

Comments

Include any justification or comments about the claim that may help your charity when deciding how to process it.

If you have a query relating to accessing or using the app, please email our support team at support@volunteero.org and one of our friendly team will be happy to help. If the query relates to the volunteering aspect then we recommend you contact the charity you volunteer for.