You can now send your volunteer hours straight to your school
No more chasing signatures or forwarding old emails. From your MiVolunteer account you can now send your Certificate of Hours to any email address, with a link they can use to check it's real.
I want to start with a story I've heard more times than I can count.
A student finishes a great season of volunteering. They showed up, they checked in, they did the work, and they earned their hours. Then June comes around and their guidance office asks for proof. Suddenly they're digging through their inbox for an email from months ago, trying to remember which account it went to, forwarding it with a "hi, here are my hours, hopefully this works," and waiting to hear back. Sometimes the school writes back asking for a signature. Sometimes the email gets lost. Sometimes it's the night before a deadline.
None of that has anything to do with the volunteering itself. It's just paperwork getting in the way of something you already earned.
So we built a small feature that I think will make a big difference: you can now share your Certificate of Hours directly from your MiVolunteer account to anyone, by email.
What it does
Every Certificate of Hours you receive from MiVolunteer now has a Share certificate button next to it, right beside the Request resend button you may already know.
You type in an email address, for example your guidance counsellor, your school's main office, a co-op teacher, or an employer. You can add a short message if you want. You check it over, hit send, and that's it.
The person you sent it to gets an email from MiVolunteer (not from you) with:
• your name
• the number of hours
• the opportunity you volunteered for
• the date or period of the hours
• when the certificate was issued
• the certificate's reference number
• a Verify this certificate button
That last part is the one I'm proudest of.
Why the verify link matters
When a school receives a certificate, the honest question on their side is: how do we know this is real?
Paper hour sheets are easy to fake. A signature on a form doesn't tell anyone much. That's exactly why MiVolunteer doesn't hand-sign paper sheets, and why every certificate we issue has its own reference number that anyone can look up on our verification page.
Before, a teacher would have to go to our site, find the verify page and type in the reference themselves. Most people won't bother, and honestly, I don't blame them.
Now the button in the email takes them straight to the verification page with your reference already filled in. One click, and they see the official record from MiVolunteer: your name, your hours, the opportunity and the dates. If it matches, they know it's genuine. If anything had been changed, it wouldn't match.
It saves the school time, and it means your hours get taken seriously the first time.
Your hours come from our records, not from the email
This is an important detail, so I want to be clear about it.
When you share a certificate, you only choose two things: who it goes to, and an optional message. Everything else in that email, including the hours, the dates and the opportunity, is pulled directly from MiVolunteer's records. Nobody, including the volunteer, can type in a different number.
That's what makes the email trustworthy for the person receiving it. It isn't a screenshot or a forwarded message that could have been edited along the way. It's MiVolunteer telling them what's on record.
Your message also goes in as plain text. Links get removed automatically. That keeps these emails clean and safe for the schools and offices receiving them.
How to share your certificate, step by step
- Sign in to your MiVolunteer account.
- Go to My hours (your Certificate of Hours page).
- Find the certificate you want to send and click Share certificate.
- Enter the email address of the person or office you want to send it to.
- Add a short message if you'd like, for example: "Hi Ms. Ahmed, here are my community involvement hours from the fall food drive."
- Click Review, check the address carefully, then click Send.
You'll see a confirmation, and the certificate card will show who you last shared it with, so you don't have to wonder whether it went out.
A small tip from me: double check the address before you send. A one-letter typo in a school email is the most common reason things go missing.
A few things worth knowing
You can only share your own certificates. The button only appears on certificates that belong to you, and only once the certificate has been issued and emailed to you.
There's a sensible daily limit. You can share up to 15 certificates a day, and the same certificate up to 5 times a day. That's plenty for sending it to your school, a counsellor and an employer, while keeping the system from being misused.
The person you send it to isn't signed up for anything. They get that one email. We don't add them to a mailing list, and the email says so.
Request resend still works. If you need a fresh copy of the certificate in your own inbox, you can still ask our team to resend it. Sharing is for sending it to someone else.
Who this is for
Mostly, this is for students. If you're in high school in Ontario, you know about the 40 hours of community involvement you need to graduate, and you know how stressful the paperwork side can get near the end of the year.
But it's not only for students. Adults use their hours too: for job applications, scholarship forms, program applications, references, or just to show someone what they've been part of. If anyone asks you "can you send me proof of your volunteer hours?", this is now a 30-second answer instead of a hunt through your inbox.
Why we keep building things like this
At MiVolunteer, we care a lot about volunteering being easy to start and easy to keep doing. A big part of that is respecting the effort people put in. If you gave your Saturday to a food drive, you shouldn't have to give up another evening chasing a signature to prove it.
Every feature we add tries to take one piece of friction away, for volunteers, for the organizations we work with, and for the schools that rely on accurate hours. This one is small, but I think a lot of you are going to use it, especially around report card and graduation season.
If you try it and something feels confusing, or there's another place you wish your hours could go, tell us. A lot of what we build starts with a volunteer saying "it would be really nice if..."
Thank you for everything you do. Now go send those hours.
