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Guide: Designing Your Volunteer Application
Guide: Designing Your Volunteer Application

Self-configure your onboarding flow for your volunteer applicants to follow.

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

This guide will include information on:

  1. Screening Questions

  2. Volunteer Profile

  3. Tasks

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

Volaby’s onboarding flow

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.

SCREENING QUESTIONS

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.

  1. Navigate to the Admin Console

  2. Click Onboarding.

  3. Click add question

  4. Write the question

  5. Select the correct answer (really helpful when setting the auto-approve in the next step)

  6. Click 'Add question'

Editing screening questions

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.

Using Auto-approve Application

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.


VOLUNTEER PROFILE

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:

  1. Navigate to the Task Management page.

  2. Click on the Tasks tab.

  3. Click Required and then find the "Volunteer Profile" task and click on it to open it.

  4. Click on Edit.

  5. Use the 4 elements on the right side to create more fields and break up the form

    Fields: This element will decide how you want to capture the information from the applicant. There is a variety of field types to choose from

    Headings: This element help breaks up the form (for example a heading might be "Emergency Contact Details" or "Tell Us A Little About You")

    Content: This element allows you to give more detail to the applicant. It is also a space to upload files (such as forms or documents) for your applicants to download and read)

    Media: This element allows you to add URL links to Youtube or Vimeo videos. This could be a welcome video, instructions, or induction video for your applicants.

  6. When you are happy with the form, click Save Changes.

Volunteer Profile completion

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.

TASKS

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;

  • Upload Resumé

  • Read our volunteering agreement

  • Submit your driver’s license details

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

  1. Navigate to Task Management.

  2. Click on Create Task.

  3. Set a name or title for your new task.

  4. Select a place to add the task to. Click on the Add task drop-down.

    You have two options to choose between; Onboarding and General. You also have the power to change the name of General to anything you like or add other folders in the Task page.

    There folders exist to help you organise your tasks. Onboarding are the only tasks that will appear during the Onboarding phase. If you want to offer volunteers the opportunity to complete the task, but make it non-mandatory or have them complete them once onboarded select another folder.

  5. Once all of your tasks are complete, you can use the reorder button to arrange them in the order you would like for best user experience. The Volunteer Profile will always need to be first, but you can arrange the tasks after that.

  6. Finally you can change the name and description of these task headings to suit your organisation and click done to save changes.

Manual review

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.

Adding Elements to Your Tasks

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

  • Fields: This element will decide how you want to capture the information from the applicant. There is a variety of field types to choose from

  • Headings: This element helps breaks up the form (for example a heading might be "Emergency Contact Details" or "Tell Us A Little About You")

  • Content: This element allows you to give more detail to the applicant. It is also a space to upload files (such as forms or documents) for your applicants to download and read)

  • Media: This element allows you to add URL links to YouTube or Vimeo videos. This could be a welcome video, instructions, or induction video for your applicants.

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

Deleting Tasks and Fields

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.

Moving Fields between Tasks

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.

Allow Volunteers to Update Tasks After Submission

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.

Add Expiration Date to Task

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

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