Free tool
ERG cost per attendee calculator
Work out what one seat in the room costs your women's network, and how much of the annual budget is already committed before the year starts.
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ERG volunteer hours calculator
Add up what running the women's network actually takes from your core team across a year, in hours, in hours per person per month, and in payroll value.
ERG work is done in the margins of other jobs, which is exactly why it goes unmeasured. The hours are real, they are concentrated in a handful of people, and when one of them leaves or burns out the program stalls for a quarter. Putting a number on the load is the first step in any conversation about stipends, protected time or an additional co lead.
This calculator separates event work from the recurring administration that never appears on a calendar, which is answering questions, updating the roster, chasing invoices, writing recaps and assembling reports. That second bucket is usually the larger of the two, and it is the one leadership consistently underestimates.
Your result
Total volunteer hours this year
798
Event delivery plus the recurring administration nobody schedules.
Hours per core team member each month
11.1
Compare this against what your leadership believes the commitment is.
Payroll value of the donated time
$38,304
Not a request for payment, a measure of what the company receives.
Share of a full time role
0.4
Based on a 2080 hour work year, which is the standard US full time figure.
If the hours per person figure crosses roughly eight a month, most chapters are one resignation away from a gap, and that is the argument for a co lead or protected time.
The load is never spread the way the roster suggests
A core team of six on paper is usually two people carrying most of it. Run the calculator once with your real team size and again with the number of people who would still deliver the summit if two dropped out, and the second figure is the one that describes your actual risk.
That concentration is also what makes succession fragile. When the lead is promoted, which is the outcome the program was built to produce, several hundred hours of institutional knowledge leaves with her unless the record of how the year runs lives somewhere other than her inbox.
Turning hours into a funding argument
The payroll value figure is not a bill. It is context, and it works best paired with cost per attendee, because together they say the company received a program worth this much in time for a cash budget of that much.
It is also the honest opening for the stipend conversation. Before asking for compensation, know the hours, know how they split between event delivery and administration, and know which part software or an admin partner could absorb, because leadership will ask what changes before any money moves.
Questions about this calculator
What hourly rate should we use?
Use a blended figure that reflects the seniority of the core team, since ERG leads are often mid level and senior employees. If your finance partner publishes an internal cost per hour, use theirs, because a number they recognize is harder to argue with.
Does this support a stipend request?
It supports the size of the case, not the mechanism. Stipends touch payroll, wage and hour rules and your equity story, so the hours figure is where the conversation starts and your HR and legal partners decide the form the money takes.
How do we track hours without adding admin to the admin?
Log time at the event level rather than daily, since one entry per event plus a monthly estimate for recurring work is accurate enough for a board packet. ERGCircle records this alongside attendance so the annual report picks it up automatically.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The ERG annual impact report readiness checklist
Four stages that turn a year of ERG events, receipts and survey answers into a report an executive sponsor can absorb in ten minutes.
Back that figure with a year of check in lists
A number typed into a browser is an estimate, and an estimate is what gets challenged in the room. The same figure pulled from verified attendance and invoices matched to approved lines is evidence, which is the difference between a sponsor nodding along and a sponsor defending your catering line in a tight quarter. Show us your last ERG year in a demo and we will rebuild this calculation from your own records.