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Creating Activity Reports
Creating Activity Reports

Creating Report Types is a pivotal space in your Volaby set up. They allow you to collect multiple data points across all your operations.

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Written by Volaby Support
Updated over a year ago


Before creating your report type/s, have a read of our best practice article that may conceptualise the necessity of report types for your operations.

If you are looking to not submit a report you can visit our other articles on No Report Required (No Impact) or No Report (Impact Tracked).

You can also utilise the the ability to pin popular report fields and also merge field types across reports. You can read more about these at the end of this article.

Creating a report type can be done in two places:

  1. Management / Activities Console / Manage Report Types

  2. Management/ Activities Console / Click an Activity / Edit / Add another session / Create New Report Type

Please note:

  • You cannot select a default report for activities, you will need to manually select a report type every time you create an activity

  • You cannot change the report type once an activity has taken place

NEW! You can now restrict report information to the volunteer who was rostered on that session. More information at the bottom of this guide.

Activities Console

  1. Navigate to Report Management

2. Click 'Create Report Type'

3. Fill in this box to give your report type a name and then click on ‘Add a description’ below to add a description.

* Adding a description is optional, this can be utilised to add notes for this particular report type and will not be visible to the volunteers.

4. Start adding some fields to your report type. Fields are impact measurement points. What do you want to know about and measure from this activity?

When creating your fields, keep in mind:

  • Reports are captured after a session is complete

  • By default, the reporter will be asked the start and end time, and the attendance of the activity

  • By default, the report submission includes an optional space for the reporter to leave any additional comments or feedback

Therefore, you won't have to include the above fields in the report.

You can then either choose from existing report fields or create new report fields.

To choose from existing:

5. Browse or search the report fields from other report. This can be done to centralise your data from various reports.

6. Click on one of the fields to select one that is already available, and then click on ‘Add Field’ to save.

7. Once you have finished adding in reporting headings and fields, you can save the report by clicking Save Report Type.

To create new report fields:

There are 8 field types that capture different data points in Volaby: checklist item, dropdown, rating, thumbs up/down, attachment, time, text, number. Each field type is best used for different data points. There is the option to provide a description for each field. When thinking about constructing your fields, think about how you would like data exported in the future.

If you have a lot of fields that need to be in the report, consider "Add Heading" to break up the volume and give the report type structure, again this is optional.

5. Click on ‘Add description’ to add instructions.

6. You can opt to highlight this field by clicking on the slider next to ‘Assign as Featured Field’.

You can also make this field optional by clicking on the slider next to ‘Make field optional’, not clicking on the slider will make this a required field.

7. Click on ‘Add field’ at the bottom to save changes.

*Session Creation Screen

Sometimes when you are Creating an Activity as well as its sessions, you may find your existing report types don't quite suit. If this does happen, you have the ability to create a new report type when creating your activity. When you start creating activities initially, this may be the easiest place to set up your report types.

Personalised Report

  1. Click Create New Report Type

Which will drop down a screen displayed below:

2. Create your report type as you would in the previous steps starting with a name, and description and continuing with field types.

3. Save your new report type and it will be saved in the Report Type Bank with any others.

Some handy additional features are:

Pinned Report Fields

Pin important fields to the top of your page for easier visibility when creating new reports.
Example: My star rating asking volunteers how they find their activity is something I would like in all reports, so I can pin this to the top and it will be easy to see when anyone is creating reports

Merge Report Fields
If you have the same field in more than 1 report, you can now collate them into 1 data point.
Example: I have 2 different reports asking how many pieces of rubbish we collected, I can now merge these 2 sets of data into one so I can see how many pieces of rubbish we have collected all together in the Impact Dashboard


Who can edit a report?

Activity Leaders and Program Managers can edit reports they have access to! It is important to note that only Admins of Volaby (highest level of permission) can create and edit reports.


Who can submit a report?

Volunteers, managers and admins can submit a report. It is important to remember that only volunteers who are on the team, can submit a report for that activity.

If you choose to have volunteers submit reports, this is a conversation best had as part of orientation or inductions so they are aware of this responsibility. Alternatively, management can fill in the reports.


Who can view a submitted report?

The volunteers who have been rostered on for an activity will be able to see all submitted session reports, even if added just for one session on a roster. If you would prefer for general volunteers to only be able to see the report that corresponds to the session they attended, you can enable a function named Strict Session Reporting. This will mean that general volunteers can only see the completed reports for the session the were rostered onto. This might be used when handling sensitive information or asking your volunteers to give feedback following an activity.

Visit the Admin Console, click on Operations to view the Reporting options.


Restrict Report Visibility

If you are capturing sensitive or confidential information in your reports, this feature will allow you to restrict who has access to viewing this data.

To enable this feature:

  1. Visit the Admin Console

  2. Click Operations

  3. Scroll down to Reporting

  4. Turn on toggle for Strict Session Reporting

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