Counting Volunteers and Volunteer Roles in Elvanto

Photo by Crissy Jarvis. Unsplash

Ever wondered how many volunteers there are at your church, and how many volunteer roles people are involved in? It’s actually harder to count than you might think. But not that hard with some help.

At Hope Church, we’ve recently started trying to measure these things.

Here’s what we’ve done, and how we’ve done it.

Counting Volunteers

To count volunteers:

Step 1. Update Elvanto

Make sure you have every single role in your church listed in Elvanto. Think hard about this one. There will be many that might not immediately come to mind.

Step 2. Create Report

Create a standard report. As below, select “departments”, “contains” and then, in the third box, select every department in your church.

Step 3. Give it a name

I call this report, “Total Volunteers”.

Step 4. Hit “Save and Generate”

This will tell you how many volunteers are currently involved in serving.

Note: Elvanto has other ways of measuring volunteers, but often this only includes those who are rostered. Many roles in your church will not need to be rostered.

Counting Eligible Volunteer Members

Next, you might like to compare the number of volunteers with the number of eligible volunteers at your church. We calculate this by generating a report calculating all members who are not children. We include junior and senior youth as some of these people serve.

So, we created a standard report with the following fields:

We call this report “Total Eligible Members”.

You can then hit “Save and Generate” to get your number.

Now you can calculate you Member Participation Rate.

So, if you have 90 eligible church members, and 70 people serving, you would have a Member Participation Rate of 78% (that is, =70/90*100).

Counting Current Volunteer Roles

Next, you might like to see how many roles people volunteer in. To do this:

Step 1. Generate your “Total Volunteers” report

Step 2. Click on “Export” and Export to Excel

It should look something like this:

Step 3. Use magic formula

Next, use this formula to count the number of roles people serve in:

=LEN(G2)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(G2,",",""))+1
As below, paste this into cell H2, select all of the cells you need to count …

… and then hit Command D (Control D on Windows). It will apply the formula to the other cells:

As you can see, it counts the number of roles listed, separated by commas.

Step 4. Use the SUM formula

Next, use the sum formula to add up all of those roles.

So, if I want to count all of the volunteer roles in cells H2:H6, I punch in this formula in cell H7: =SUM(H2:H6).

And then out pops my total.

Now I know my total Number of Current Volunteer Roles.

Counting Needed Volunteer Roles

But there may be volunteer roles that we would like to have, but at the moment, nobody is serving in these roles.

Calculating this is a little more tedious.

We have a spreadsheet that lists every role, either that exists or that we would like to exist. We then calculate how many people we would like to fill certain roles, and then add them all up.

This gives us our “Number of Needed Volunteer Roles”.

Once we have our “Needed Volunteer Roles”, we can work out our Vacancy Rate. We calculate this as follows:

Vacancy Rate = (Number of Current Volunteer Roles) / (Number of Current Volunteer Roles + Number of Needed Volunteer Roles)

So, if we have 12 as our Number of Current Volunteer Roles (as in the example above) and we need 2 more, our vacancy rate =2/(2+12) = 0.14. Times it by 100 and you get 14%.

Why Count This?

Jesus served us to save us (Mark 10:45). In the New Testament, as the saved people of God, we’re called to serve too (1 Peter 4:10). If we’re a healthy church, people will be serving, and numbers can reflect that. The numbers above might be a helpful way of measuring the overall health of the church, which, in turn, could help your church make good decisions.

For example, if a number like the Vacancy Rate keeps rising, it might mean that your church is trying to do more than your people are able to do.

Or, if a number like the Member Participation Rate keeps rising, it might mean that your church is ready to try starting something new.

So, maybe it’s time to start thinking about crunching some extra numbers.

It’s early days for us. We haven’t tested heaps of this. But I’m keen to keep an eye on this stuff and see if it ends up being helpful.