Truth talk…duplicating work is one of my biggest pet peeves.
There’s no reason to expend time and energy working a problem that someone has already solved, right? Enter volunteer sign up templates! These are great tools to get you started on creating effective volunteer sign up forms.
As you tailor these templates for your needs, keep in mind the following tips!
Don’t drown in data.
Asking the questions tends to be the easy part, but how are you at organizing and using the resulting data? In my personal experience, one of the biggest mistakes I’ve been a part of included procuring a HUGE data set from willing volunteers but not having adequate data management or volunteer coordination afterward. We had developed outstanding excitement and volunteer engagement, but we weren’t equipped once we had responses in hand. You can do better! Have a plan in place and personnel identified to make the most of your sign up opportunities.
Keep the helpful. Drop the interesting.
Curiosity is a great character trait – it leads to some amazing outcomes! But sometimes it bogs down a sign up form. After you’ve put together your content, go back through your questions and keep only the questions that are truly serving you and your volunteers well. If it’s only interesting but not helpful, drop it.
Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
Make signing up for your event as easy as possible. Is the form easy to read? Do they know which box correlates with which question? Can you embed your online form into your webpage instead of using a link that takes them away from your site? You don’t want to give your potential volunteers any reason to stop their sign up process. Any barriers you can lessen or remove now makes it that much simpler for your future volunteers.
You can always ask for more.
After your volunteers sign up, you can always reach out with additional surveys or polls. Sometimes it’s best to create a wide funnel entrance to catch as many volunteers as possible. At this point you may only need name, contact information, and availability. After you have their information and interest, you can delve deeper through follow up communication, if you see fit. Additional surveys may help you identify experienced volunteer leaders or a specific skill set that fills a certain volunteer job description. It’s not always needed, but take a few minutes to evaluate whether a tiered sign up process works well for your target audience!