Service Reporting

Every club should be reporting their activities to the District and Lions International via MyLion. Effective LY 2020, reporting via MyLion is the only way to participate in the District Contest.

What types of activities can be reported on MyLion?

• Service Activities
• Donations
• Fundraisers
• Meetings

Who reports service, and how?

All club members are responsible for making sure their service is reported, but only a set of core club officers can officially report service on MyLion:

1. Lions Club Service Chair
2. Lions or Leos Club Secretary
3. Lions Club Administrator
4. Lions or Club President
5. Leo Club Advisor

If you are not one of these officers, then your responsibility in reporting service is to make sure those officers have the information they need to make their service report on behalf of your club whenever you attend a service activity. This minimum required information is found below.

How do club officers report?

Reporting is done via MyLion after signing into your Lion Account. (Click here for more information for Lion Accounts). Activities can be reported before or after the event takes place.

• Any Lion/Leo can create an event listing on MyLion before the event takes place, containing basic information (date, time, location, description). Once the event is over, a club officer must follow up and supplement that listing with the minimum required information listed above, before the report is considered formally submitted.
• Club officers can report an event after it has completed, and will only need to provide the minimum information listed above.

For a step by step walkthrough on service reporting as a club officer, please see the How to Report Service Guide under Additional Resources below. Otherwise, log on to MyLion using the button below.

Reporting requirements

Lions International prefers that clubs report at least monthly. District Region and Zone Chairs receive a Club Health Assessment report at the beginning of the month, listing the number of months since as club has last reported. If your club exceeds 3 months of non reporting, the number turns red, indicating that your Zone Chair should check up on you.

If your club has not had any service activities recently, remember that you can report your monthly meetings on MyLion as well. This is not required (since it does not impact service metrics), but should help tide over clubs who are not meeting the reporting requirements with service activities.

Frequently Asked Questions

Some commonly asked service reporting questions, answered by the Global Service Team. Constantly updated, to submit a question, please contact us.

Contact the Global Service Team by emailing service AT lions4c4.org

Note that the additional resource Measuring Service Impact provided by Lions International answers a lot of basic questions regarding service reporting, and should be the first place you look if you have any questions.

Why should we report?

Lions International explains it more eloquently in the Why Service Reporting Matters document linked above, under Additional Resources, but it can be summarized by:

• Visibility: Reporting an activity makes it instantly visible to your members, the District, and Lions International. This can become a source of pride for the club, but can also have further reaching effects as other clubs emulate and build on successful projects.
• Aggregation: Activities reported can be aggregated to show a club, district, or Lions International’s overall service impact over the course of the year, whether that be number of people served, number of volunteers mobilized, or number of hours worked. Having hard data on how your club serves it’s community can prove useful when recruiting new members, forging partnerships with other organizations, and applying for funding.
• Historical preservation: This reporting system is the future, and having your clubs’ activities recorded digitally ensures they are there for your future members to refer to. This is similar to how MyLCI has become the recordkeeper for our organization’s membership and leadership history.

How to calculate an ambiguous number of people served?

In some cases, number of people served may be not be an exact number.

For instance, if your service activity is affecting households, for instance packing grocery bags for families, this number can be estimated by the average household size being 2.59 people (2020 census data).

Lions International’s official guidance can be found in the Additional Resource titled Measuring Service Impact linked above, but can be summarized to doing your research using whatever resources you have available to you (information from service partner organizations, census data, observation/counting during the event) and estimating to your best ability.

How often should we report recurring projects?

Short answer: Up to you and your club.

We understand with projects that happen on a regular basis, like every week, it may be tedious to submit the same report with the same information week by week. Fortunately, MyLion allows you to open an existing report and “duplicate” it, saving you some trouble. But it really is up to your club how granular to make your reports, you can list a weekly project as separate entries per day, giving you the ability to report exactly how many people were reported each week. Or you can aggregate these activities monthly, setting the duration of each activity to the entire month, and just reporting the monthly figures with some more detail in the activity description (if you so choose). It really is up to you. Remember that these activity reports are not just for Lions International, but also for your club’s own records, so keep as much detail as you would like to keep for yourself.

Caveat: Each service activity report is capped to serving up to 3,000 people, with any above not counting towards your service metrics. So if you serve more than 3,000 a month in a recurring project, you should be reporting more often than monthly to capture all that impact.

How to report joint service projects/projects involving multiple clubs?

If there is a primary organizing club that is doing most of the work/planning, it is preferred that that club be in charge of reporting the service impact of the project, with the other clubs simply reporting their volunteer hours for their individual members. This is the simplest way to jointly report.

If all participating clubs are for the most part equally involved, then it is possible for all clubs to report the service project individually, and split up the number of people served, either equally or in proportion to the number of volunteers present from each club. Please be sure that all clubs are in agreement as to how the service impact will be split among you, preferably in writing, so no over reporting is done by mistake.

If clubs work on a project together, but each have a separate role in it and offer a unique service, then it is possible to report these as separate activities that happen to be geographically and temporally adjacent. For instance, if multiple Lions clubs participate in a county fair, but each club has its own separate booth offering different attractions, then each club can report their number of people served separately. It may be that some people visit both booths and are counted twice, however these people were offered separate services, and that will be reflected in the report description.

Please use your best judgement when reporting in this way. An inappropriate example would be two clubs jointly holding a crab feed, with one club in charge of cooking and another in charge of serving the food. If 100 people attend, and both clubs report that they served 100 people, this would be overreporting. While it is technically true that in the report description, one club will report that they cooked for 100 and the other served for 100, the fact of the matter is neither of these services would be possible without the other. It would be disingenuous for the total number of people served by Lions to be counted as 200 when in fact there were only 100 people present at the event.

We do acknowledge that there is a gray line here, and are happy to field any questions regarding how to report joint service projects.

Contact the Global Service Team by emailing service AT lions4c4.org

How are District activities reported?

Activities under the direction of the District can be reported as a District activity, and the impact and service credit will be associated with the District directly as opposed to an individual club. This makes sense to do if the event is hosted by a District committee, endorsed project, or directly by the cabinet.

All District Committee Chairpersons with access to MyLCI (see Additional Resource above titled MyLion Access Positions for full list) can report a District Activity. In addition, the Global Service Team and IT Committee have access to report District activities, as well as activities on behalf of a specific club. If you are a District appointed representative without access, please forward your report (again, including the minimum required information listed above) to the GST to be reported on behalf of the District.

Contact the Global Service Team by emailing service AT lions4c4.org

How should non-service Lion activities, like conventions, meetings, trainings, be reported?

In most cases, if a Lion activity is not service centric, it should be regarded as a meeting and reported as such (with no number of people served).

Some examples of exceptions to this rule:

• If the meeting is solely focused on planning a service project, such as a service committee meeting, then those hours can be included in the volunteer hours served for that particular service activity
• If the meeting is a training, the Lions conducting the training can report it as a service activity, with the number of people served being the number of attendees. Of course, the Lions attending the training should consider it a meeting, even if the training enables future service activities (since the number of people served is unknown at the time)