The volunteer application is the path a new applicant walks from their first sign-up click to becoming a fully active volunteer. Volaby gives you flexible control over what to ask at sign-up, what to collect in the volunteer profile, what tasks they need to complete during onboarding, and how much manual review each step needs.
This guide covers the full application design end-to-end. For managing applicants once they're in your pipeline, see Tracking Incoming Volunteers.
How an applicant moves through your application
Before you start configuring, here's the shape of the flow your applicants will walk through.
1. Sign-up — The applicant lands on your sign-up page (or arrives via an invite link or funnel), submits their email, and answers your screening questions.
2. Application approval — If their screening answers are correct, or if you've enabled global Application Approval, they pass straight through. Otherwise the application appears in your Pending Review queue for a manager to approve or reject.
3. Volunteer Profile — Once their application is approved, the applicant fills in their Volunteer Profile. This is the first task in the Onboarding category and collects the basic personal information you need from every volunteer.
4. Onboarding tasks — The applicant works through the rest of the tasks in the Onboarding category — training, document uploads, compliance checks, interviews, and anything else you require before activation.
5. Final approval — Once all required tasks are complete, you approve the applicant as a fully activated volunteer. Or, if Application Approval is on, they activate themselves automatically.
Where to design your application
The application is configured across two areas:
Admin Console > Onboarding & Applications — screening questions, application approval, multi-program selection, activity preferences and availability, role applications
Task Management > Tasks — the Volunteer Profile, all onboarding tasks, categories and stages
These two areas work together. The Onboarding & Applications panel decides what your applicant fills out at each stage; Task Management is where you design the Volunteer Profile and all the onboarding tasks themselves.
Onboarding & Applications
Navigate to Admin Console > Onboarding & Applications. The panel has several sections you can configure top to bottom.
Screening Questions
Screening questions are short yes/no questions the applicant answers as part of sign-up, before their account is created. They're your chance to filter out applicants who don't meet your basic requirements quickly, without manager work.
Click Add to create a new question. For each question:
Question — write the question (e.g. "Are you over 18?", "Can you commit to two hours a week?", "Do you have a current driver's licence?")
Correct Answer — choose Yes, No, or Either
If the applicant's answer matches the correct answer (or the correct answer is "Either"), they pass screening. Otherwise they're flagged for manual review.
Keep screening questions short — five at most — and binary. They're not the place for free-text or multiple-choice; that's what onboarding tasks are for.
Application Approval
This setting controls whether applicants automatically progress through the application without manager intervention.
On — Applicants who pass screening are automatically approved, and once they complete all their tasks they're automatically activated as full volunteers — no manager intervention needed at any stage.
Off — Applications and final activations always require manual review. A manager has to approve the application after sign-up, and approve the volunteer once their tasks are complete.
This is the global automation switch. Individual tasks still have their own Manual Review settings (covered below) — Application Approval doesn't override those.
Multi-program selection
By default, an applicant joins one program. Toggle Multi-program selection on if you want applicants to be able to select more than one program during sign-up — useful if you have programs that overlap in audience or location.
Activities & Availabilities
This section lets you collect activity preferences and availability from applicants as part of onboarding.
Activity Preferences & Enrolment — When enabled, applicants can indicate which activities they're interested in. On approval, they're automatically enrolled in those activity teams (or added to the application list or waitlist if the team requires approval or is full).
Availability — Choose one of two modes (they're mutually exclusive):
Simple Availability — Applicants indicate availability in a basic weekday-and-time grid. This stays as profile information but doesn't transfer to roster availability.
Enhanced Availability — Applicants indicate availability on a date-and-session basis, and that information transfers directly to their roster availability once they're approved.
Stage assignment — Both Activity Preferences and Availability sections can be assigned to a specific task stage. When a stage is assigned, the picker appears within that stage's task flow rather than as a separate "Additional Section" at the end. This keeps your onboarding feeling like one continuous flow.
Roles
Toggle Apply for Roles on if you want applicants to be able to apply for specific activity roles during onboarding. Applicants will see the available roles you've defined in the Roles tab and can select which ones they want.
Roles can also have their own attached tasks — applicants need to complete those before their role application can be approved. This is useful when certain roles require specific training or compliance checks.
Like Activities and Availabilities, Roles can be assigned to a stage to embed them in the main task flow.
Task Management
Navigate to Task Management > Tasks from the main menu. This is where you build the Volunteer Profile, all onboarding tasks, and any post-activation tasks.
Categories — Onboarding and General
Tasks are organised into categories. Two categories come with every Volaby setup:
Onboarding — every task in the Onboarding category is part of the application/onboarding flow. Applicants must complete these tasks (or have them auto-approved) before they can become a fully active volunteer. The Volunteer Profile lives here by default.
General — tasks in the General category are post-activation. Volunteers see them after they've been approved as full volunteers. Use them for ongoing tasks, optional information, or things that don't gate onboarding.
You can create additional categories from the Task Management screen. Any task in a non-Onboarding category is treated as a post-activation task — only the Onboarding category appears in the application flow.
The Volunteer Profile
The Volunteer Profile is a special default task that comes with every Volaby setup. It lives in the Onboarding category and is the first task every applicant fills in.
Volaby pre-collects the following fields by default — you don't need to add these to the Volunteer Profile yourself:
First Name (required)
Last Name (required)
Preferred Name (optional)
Date of Birth (optional)
Contact Number (required)
Choose a Program (required — the program the volunteer is applying to)
You can add more fields, headings, content blocks and media to the Volunteer Profile to collect any additional baseline information — emergency contact details, "About me", profile photo prompts, address, photo permissions, and so on. Just don't duplicate the default fields above.
The Volunteer Profile uses the same task editor as any other task. Find it in your Task Management list and click into it to edit.
Creating onboarding tasks
To create a task that's part of the application flow, navigate to the Onboarding category in Task Management and click Create Task.
When creating a task in the Onboarding category, you'll see a dropdown menu with several task types to choose from (some require a Plus or Pro plan):
Task — a standard task that the volunteer fills in directly
Manager Task — a task that managers complete on behalf of the volunteer (useful for things like reference verification or interview notes)
Referee Check — collects references from external contacts. You specify how many referees are required, and volunteers provide referee contact details. Each referee receives a secure link to fill in your reference form.
Event — a scheduled event task for things like interviews, training sessions, or orientation meetings. Managers can schedule events, assign coordinators, and record outcomes. Events can be in-person or remote.
Payment (Pro plan) — collects payments via Stripe Checkout. Supports one-time payments or recurring subscriptions.
Each task has the following common properties:
Name — short, descriptive (e.g. "Read the Code of Conduct", "Upload Working with Children Check")
Description — optional, shown to volunteers as helper text
Category — which task category this task belongs to
Stage — which stage of onboarding this task lives in (optional, see Stages below)
Items — the actual content of the task (heading, content, media, field)
Plus a range of advanced settings, covered in Advanced Task Settings.
Items in a task
Each task is built from a stack of items. Click Add Field to collect data from the volunteer, or use the smaller links to add other content:
Heading — a section title for breaking up a long task
Content — explanatory text, instructions, or context
Media — images, videos (YouTube/Vimeo links), or attachments for the volunteer to read or watch
Field — an actual input the volunteer fills in (see field types below)
Field types
Volaby supports the following field types in tasks. Pick the type that matches the data you need:
Text and number
Short Answer — single-line text
Long Answer — multi-line text
Number — numeric input
Email — email address with validation
Phone Number — phone number with validation
Choice fields
Multiple Choice — pick one from a list
Checkboxes — pick multiple from a list
Dropdown — pick one from a dropdown (supports type-to-search if enabled)
Quiz — multiple choice with a correct answer for self-marking quizzes
Other
Date — date picker
Address — address with auto-complete
Attachments — file upload (single or multiple files)
Signature — signed agreement
Cross-Task Dynamic Field — pulls a value from another task field, useful for chained workflows
Each field can be marked Optional or required. Most field types support helper text descriptions and additional configuration options like character limits, allowed file types, or option lists.
Stages
A stage is a phase of onboarding that contains a set of tasks. Stages give you control over the order in which tasks become available, and let you gate progress at logical points within the Onboarding category.
Each stage has:
Name — e.g. "Welcome", "Training", "Final Steps"
Order — its position in the sequence
Auto-open — when enabled, the stage unlocks automatically once the previous stage is complete. When disabled, a manager has to manually open the stage for the applicant.
Tasks are assigned to a stage from each task's properties. A task without a stage isn't part of the staged flow — it just sits in the general task pool within its category.
Stages and categories are independent. A task belongs to a Category (Onboarding or another) AND can optionally belong to a Stage (which controls when it becomes available within the flow). Categories group; stages sequence.
Activity Preferences, Availability, and Role applications can also be assigned to stages so they appear in the natural task flow rather than as a separate Additional Section.
Block-progress tasks
A task can be marked as Blocks Progress. When this is enabled, all tasks that come after it stay hidden from the volunteer until the blocking task is approved. Use this for tasks that act as gates — for example, an interview booking that needs to happen before the applicant gets access to training materials.
Block-progress is only available when Manual Review is on for the task — you can't auto-approve a gate.
Manual Review per task
Each task has its own Manual Review toggle in the task settings:
Manual Review on — when the volunteer submits the task, it goes to Pending Review and waits for a manager to approve or reject it.
Manual Review off — when the volunteer submits the task, it's automatically marked as approved and they continue.
Per-task Manual Review is independent of the global Application Approval toggle. Application Approval controls whether an application is auto-approved on sign-up and whether the volunteer is auto-activated after tasks complete; per-task Manual Review controls each task individually.
Cross-links
For related setup and management:
Tracking Incoming Volunteers — managing applicants once they're in your pipeline
Application Funnels — guided application flows for targeted campaigns
Advanced Task Settings — visibility, expiry, blocks-progress and other task-level toggles
Task Expiry Dates — recurring task expiry for things like training refreshers and certificate renewals
Task Segmentation — restricting tasks to specific programs, roles, or activities
Notifications & Alerts — admin notifications for new applications and reviews