Volunteer Tips and Tricks
- May 13
- 2 min read
Updated: 42 minutes ago
Updated 5/13/2026
Volunteers are a wealth of information. A series of Tips and Tricks to Make Volunteering Easier for Everyone cover the following topics. (Expand each item to see the information.)
Remembering What You've Done to Report Hours - Updated June 2026
Tracking Volunteer Activities - Updated May 2026
Note: When Don says "paid" for transportation, he means travel times count as volunteer time.
Using Sign Up Genius - Updated April 2026
Don M shares some pro-tips for using Sign Up Genius. These hacks are especially useful to interns but even seasoned volunteers will learn something from Don.
Volunteer Etiquette and Branding
Reporting Volunteer & Continuing Education Hours
Using State MG Volunteer Website
Designing a New Volunteer Project
Reporting For Your Project
Apps for Identifying Unknown Plants
by Don Muske
June 10, 2026
Many of you have finished the course instruction (Congratulations!) and now it’s on to putting your knowledge to work.
Here’s a hack to help with one of the more vexing issues when you are first starting out: identifying plants and giving information about them! There are several good apps out there (PlantNet, INaturalist being two of them) but consider using AI-based apps.
I have used both ChatGPT and Claude (you can download either as an app for your phone for free – they have, of course, a subscription option) and found both of them to be very easy to use – simply take a photo of a plant (or of a pest or blighted leaf…) and hit Send. The information that comes back includes the identification of the plant, the degree of certainty (it’s not always correct), the attributes of the plant and the care for it.
The info is much better than either the apps mentioned above and the plant IDs that Apple and Android phones have come up with. (That said, both Apple and Android-based phones are coming out with AI-powered apps soon.)
The point is to use these tools and decide which is the most complete and easiest to use. AI has made plant identification and information much easier.
And one more tip: If you do use an AI-based app, use the same “Chat” each time. For example, I use a Chat I titled “Plants” each time I make another inquiry. It makes it easier to go back to find inquiries and, importantly, the AI is likely to surprise you by making connections of inquiries you have made or even come up with corrections of past Information!
