What the form counts
Form 1728A, the Annual Survey of Fraternal Activity, reports the hours a council's members gave and the money the council spent on charitable work. The hours are reported under four headings, each split into programs:
- Faith — for example RSVP, church facilities, Catholic schools and seminaries, vocations, prayer and study programs.
- Family — for example Food for Families, Keep Christ in Christmas, Family Week, family prayer nights.
- Community — for example Coats for Kids, Habitat for Humanity, disaster relief, the elderly, scouting and youth, veterans.
- Life — for example Special Olympics, marches for life, the Ultrasound Initiative, pregnancy support.
Each heading also has a miscellaneous line. Use it for work that genuinely fits nowhere else, not as a home for hours nobody sorted. The form and its instructions are issued each year; always work from the current copy, including for when it is due.
Keep the tally as you go, not at the end
The total is only ever as good as the record behind it, and the worst record is a memory. Hours reconstructed months later come out round, low, and attached to whoever happened to be asked. Three habits fix almost all of it:
- Record the hours within the week. At the next meeting at the latest: who, what, how long.
- Record per person, per activity. “Pancake breakfast, 6 men, 4 hours each” is 24 hours; “the breakfast went well” is zero.
- Pick the category when you record it. The man who did the work knows what it was; the man filling in the form a year later does not.
If you are doing it on paper or in a spreadsheet
One sheet with one row per person per activity is enough. Use these columns:
- Date of the activity
- Activity — the event or program, in your council's words
- Member
- Hours
- Heading (Faith, Family, Community, Life) and program
At the end, total the hours by heading and by program — in a spreadsheet, a pivot table does it in one step. Keep the sheet: if a number on the form is questioned, the rows are the answer.
The mistakes that make the total wrong
- Counting the same hours twice — a man active in both his council and his assembly should report each hour once, to the unit the work was done for.
- Counting the event, not the people — a four-hour event worked by ten men is forty hours.
- Losing the officers' own hours — the men organising everything are the ones who forget to write themselves down.
- Mixing up the year — check which period the current form asks about before you total anything.
Or let the site keep it for you
On a Knightly Sites council site, members log their own hours from a phone against the 1728A categories, the moment the work is done. The council's totals by heading are current every day of the year, so the survey is read off a screen rather than rebuilt from memory.
What a Knightly Sites council site does · Check the site you have now