One of the best ways to keep volunteers happy and returning year after year is by streamlining your signup process.
We’re all familiar with online forms that seem to ask for your whole life story. It’s important for volunteer registration forms to strike the perfect balance between collecting the important stuff, without asking so many questions that potential volunteers bail halfway through.
After all the effort you put into recruiting volunteers and orchestrating your events, you don’t want your signup page to be the thing that stops volunteers from signing up. So let’s simplify!
Collect only what you need! It’s best to keep your form short, and (if you can) collect all the information at once. We recommend name, email, and mobile phone number, to start. Depending on your event, you might need to get different information from volunteers who select certain jobs. For example, do volunteers in the Medical Tent need to be CPR certified? Would an ideal ‘set-up’ volunteer have some experience using power tools? Take the time to think about your event, the specific roles you need filled, and the qualifications necessary for those responsibilities.
Less is more. Think of what positions you MUST fill to keep the event moving – check-in, ticket sales, set-up and clean-up. This will make your signup form shorter, easier to navigate, and will avoid an overflow of volunteers with too many hands and not enough tasks to fill.
Revisit, reflect, and request feedback about your process. As much as we would all love for everything to go perfectly the first, second, or fiftieth time, it often doesn’t – and things change over the years. Go back and ask your volunteers for feedback about the event and include questions about the signup process. Make sure to take notes along the way, and remain open-minded to re-working your processes in order to better support your volunteers.
Partner with VolunteerLocal. Excel spreadsheets and Google docs have long been the bread and butter for volunteer coordinators. We’re here to replace those jigsaw puzzles for you. We work with all types and sizes of events, for all different size budgets. Just like your signup process, we’re here to keep things streamlined, simply, and easy for you and your volunteers.
