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Best Practice: Designing Your Volunteer Application
Best Practice: Designing Your Volunteer Application

This article hopes to provide examples of how you could configure your onboarding flow.

Nicholas Marchesi avatar
Written by Nicholas Marchesi
Updated over a week ago

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Volunteer Profile Set Up

Designing the Volunteer Profile in Volaby is completely self-configured. We have started with the basics and you are more than welcome to add more elements to your Volunteer Profile set up, but you can leave it there if you would like. We definitely recommend you add those extra elements because this will be your opportunity to design your onboarding process for your qualified volunteers. The best way to start this process is to study this illustration and see how best your volunteer onboarding process would fit into this.

As you can see, there is the ability to break your onboarding flow into 3 major sections, each with their own approval option which means that once a section is completed, you can approve or remove the application.

  1. Screening

  2. Volunteer Profile

  3. Tasks

Screening Questions

This is an optional section of the onboarding process that we recommend you use to filter potential applicants that might not be the most suitable. The questions here are designed as closed questions (i.e. questions requiring a yes and/or no answer only). They are restricted to those binary options so it is easier for you to set the Auto-Approve option to active. Examples of questions they we recommend here are can be any of the following (please note this list is a guide only):

  • Are you over the age of X?

  • Can you commit to X amount of volunteering hours each week/month?

Other screening questions that may be more appropriate for your operations could be:

  • Do you have a current driver’s licence?

  • Are you comfortable with working with animals?

As you can see from the list above, these questions are specific and require only a yes or no answer. They are very helpful in ensuring the volunteer applications you start to receive will be viable for your operations. We recommend here that you construct no more than 5. This is to work with the real estate on the page but also, you wouldn’t want to bombard your volunteer applicants with too many questions all at once. If you feel the screening questions need to be changed or deleted at any point, you can do this and it won’t distort your data in the Volunteer Database. Remember the screening question system is optional and most appropriately used when an applicant is being directed for your website, a social media post or a third party recruitment site. If you have decided not to use the Screening Questions, please make sure that the "Auto-approve" toggle is switched ON.

Your Organisation’s Volunteer Profile

This is the most important section of your onboarding process. It is here that you will be able to capture all of the personal data you need to know about a volunteer applicant to ensure they are the fit the needs of your organisation. Additionally, you will be able to capture the information you will need to contact them and add data points such as gathering their emergency contact details.

Capturing information that allows you to paint a picture of your incoming applicants could be done in many different ways. Many of our partners use this as an opportunity to design an expression of interest form inside of this profile form. There are many different elements in the form builder that allows you to create this. Using headings and content pieces are a great way to communicate clearly to your volunteer applicants about your organisation whilst also keeping them oriented with their application.

We stress the importance of the section because it is your opportunity to ensure that your applicants are best fit. If this is something you think would be useful to your organisation's needs, set the Volunteer Profile to manual approval.

Tasks

The final section of the Volunteer Profile configuration is "Tasks". Here is where you can configure certain requirements or qualifications required by your organisation is order to qualify that application. Examples of this are:

  • Police Checks

  • Working With Children Checks

  • Onboarding Documents such as Volunteer Requirements, Code of Conduct and other Policies

There are many ways to qualify the information needed by your organisation for the tasks you set. You may need to have the applicants attach something to exemplify their completion of the task. Or, you could ask them a series of questions pertaining to the reading of a specific document. Whatever you need to qualify your volunteers from an applicant to approve can rest here.

Ready to hit the tools? See our stepped out process here.

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