This guide will include information on:

We recommend reading our best practice guide first before getting your hands on the tools!

We want every new volunteer to feel loved, but boxes need to be ticked before a new legend is ready to join your mission. Volaby gives you a platform to provide your new applicants and volunteers with an effortless onboarding experience that is smooth, simple, and guided, while demanding no ongoing effort or repetitive process from you or your team.

One step at a time

To get the most out of Volaby, and give your volunteers the best experience, you’ll want to have an understanding of our onboarding flow. We start with a new applicant signing up, move through an email verification, and then enter the ‘Set up your profile’ stage. The volunteer is onboarded once they have met requirements and have a completed and approved volunteer profile.

Let’s walk through each stage;

Volaby’s onboarding flow is simple from the volunteer’s perspective. There are a few key points in the process that will determine where your manual check-ins if any, will exist. We have marked points 1, 2, and 3 in the blue circles on the diagram – let’s dig in.

You have the option to screen new volunteers with a few initial questions such as:
- Are you over 18?
- Are you prepared to apply for a Blue Card?

This step can help potential volunteers understand the non-negotiables of your organisation. If you do not wish to screen your volunteers, feel free to skip this step.

Screening questions can be edited at any time by clicking in the text box and editing the question. They can also be deleted, have their correct answer option changed and moved around in ordering.

The auto-approve switch is a direct toggle to enable/disable checkpoint 1. If the switch is on, then the applicant will be automatically passed through and will NOT require any manual review. If the switch is off then every applicant will stop at checkpoint 1 regardless of screening question responses.

Now that the volunteer has their account created and they have verified their email address - they are ready to complete the rest of the Volunteer Profile.

Volaby uses this time to capture critical user information to put toward the applicants profile, like a contact number, and date of birth. Most importantly this is the stage that we ask the applicant to select a program, ensuring that your Program Managers can track the applicant as soon as possible.

Volaby Volunteer Profile task is automatically set to Manual Review.

The purpose of this is to review volunteers before allowing them to continue with the other tasks, just build your introductory questions into the Volaby Volunteer Profile.

Adding questions here is as simple as:

With an account created and an initial volunteer profile approved, your applicant is well on their way to having a complete volunteer profile. The volunteer will be able to finish their profile once all required tasks have been submitted and approved. Checkpoint 3 can be activated by the configuring some or all of your required tasks to require Manual Review.

Give your task a short, unique name. We recommend that you make it descriptive and include an action. Some examples of task names might be;

You can add a short description if you’d like. This will appear next to the name in the list of tasks.

The manual review setting for all of your tasks is found on this Task Details panel. Switch it on to enforce that this task is always reviewed by a manager or admin before the volunteer profile can be completed.

It only takes one task with the manual review switch on to activate checkpoint 2. You can turn it on for all tasks if that makes sense in your setup. If you need to be extremely cautious about manually reviewing volunteers then it’s important that you leave at least one task unapproved until the applicant submits everything. Alternatively switching every task to Manual Review will ensure that an incoming volunteer can never have their profile approved automatically. Please let us know if you need any further clarification on this.

Earlier we referred to the 4 elements in building the Volunteer Profile - the same applies to tasks.

As the design of the tasks is going to be different for everyone, we suggest referring to the best practice guide here.

Volaby does not currently support recovering tasks and fields once they’re deleted. The delete task and delete field functionality are perfect for experimentation when creating and designing new tasks.

Please be aware that deleting a task or field that has been used by your organisation will result in that information becoming inaccessible. We strongly recommend against removing tasks and fields that are pre-existing and have already been used by volunteers.

Volaby now supports moving fields between tasks.

To do so, select Tasks tab and then click on whether Onboarding or another folder.

Find the task from the list and then click on it. After that, click on 'Options' drop-down menu.

Click on 'Move to' and select where you would like it to go.

You can now allow volunteers to update the tasks that they have already submitted.

You will need to flick the on/off switch of 'Volunteers can Update' to activate this feature.

You will be alerted that volunteers have updated the task if Manual Review is turned on, and have the option to revert to a previous state if necessary.

You can read more on your 2 options of expiration here.