Understanding Volunteers, Applications and Donors in your reports

Goodsted's reporting uses a few terms that sound similar but count different things. This article clears up what each one actually includes, so a number that looks low isn't automatically a sign something's wrong.

"Volunteers" counts unique people who have logged volunteer hours. It appears on the admin nav, the Engagement report heading and its "Top 10 volunteers" and graph, the Engagement tab on an opportunity, and the "Total Volunteers" card on an Activity page. It does not include donors - someone who only gave money or in-kind goods isn't counted here, because they didn't log hours.

"Applications" is used where a listing is really about who applied and their status, rather than a headcount of who took part - for example, an opportunity's own tab of Pending / Accepted / Declined / Withdrawn / Not Completed / Cancelled / Completed applicants (see Understanding application statuses). Because this tab can include volunteering, learning, funding and in-kind opportunities together, "Applications" is used instead of "Volunteers" so the count doesn't imply everyone logged hours.

A donor is whoever is recorded against a donation - an organisation or an individual - via the Donor field. Goodsted doesn't yet have a separate donor list or donor count on the Engagement report; donor information currently lives on the Donations listing, the Activity Donations tab, the dashboard and the export, not in the volunteer-facing metrics.

Example: a funding opportunity attracts a healthy number of applicants and, once complete, several confirmed donors - but because nobody logged volunteer hours against it, it shows zero on the "Volunteers" metric. That's not a mistake; it's simply a different kind of opportunity being measured by the wrong term. If a number on your Engagement report looks low, it's worth checking which of these three it's actually counting before assuming engagement is down.

📖 See How to read donation metrics on the Engagement report and Understanding the Engagement report vs the Delivery report.

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