If corporations in your community use Dollars for Doers or a similar program, your Connect site's "Favorite Agency" feature will show you which volunteers have met the required hours, and which nonprofits should benefit from those hours. This article explains Dollars for Doers and the "favorite agency" feature, touches on the Hours by Favorite Agency report, and explains the difference between a fanned agency and a favorite agency. Listed at the end are a few other helpful articles.

What is Dollars for Doers?

Corporations use Dollars for Doers programs — also called Volunteer Grants, Dollar For Hour, and Grants for Time — to encourage employee volunteerism. Essentially, a company provides grants to the nonprofits or charities based on its employees’ time spent volunteering. A company may donate $1 per volunteer hours, or as much as $25 or more per hour. Employees can find and sign up for opportunities on your Connect site, log their volunteer hours, and then their companies can offer grants to nonprofits, based on the reported and approved volunteer hours.

This program is used to both encourage employees to donate their time, and to express a company’s social responsibility to the public. You can learn more about Dollars for Doers in this Galaxy Digital blog post.

What is a "Favorite Agency"?

Your Connect site's users can select a "favorite agency," either during registration or by editing their user profile. Here's an example of how the Favorite Agency field appears if activated in registration.

The Favorite Agency field can be used for Dollars for Doers and similar programs. By selecting a favorite agency, a volunteer can indicate which nonprofit they'd like to support with their company's Dollars for Doers program. Volunteers can only select one favorite agency.

Note: The term "Favorite" can be overridden by a different term as requested. For example, you can have "Favorite" changed to "Dollars for Doers" throughout your site so that the Favorite Agencies field reads Dollars for Doers Agency. Contact our Customer Care team to request a language override.

Hours By Favorite Agency Report

The Hours by Favorite Agency report was designed specifically for sites that run a Dollars for Doers type of program. It displays all volunteers with approved hours within a specified date range, along with each listed volunteer's favorite agency.

Hours shown are the total volunteered for that agency. For example, Blake Anderson (above) may have 50 volunteer hours for various agencies, but this report only shows the 10 he worked for A Dog's Tail Animal Rescue.

As with all Connect site reports, you can export this data by clicking the Export icon above the table.

Favorite Agencies and Fanned Agencies

When a volunteer fans an agency, they'll get notifications when that agency has posted a new need or event; fanning an agency is a way of "following" the agency online.

When a volunteer selects a favorite agency, they're saying that they'd like for their volunteer hours to have a financial benefit via corporate grants for their selected nonprofit.

Tip: To prevent confusion, you may want to override "favorite agency" with a term that better reflects the program being used in your community--for instance, "Dollars for Doers agency," "Grants for Time agency," etc.

Related Articles

Here are a couple of articles related for further reading: