Events
Volunteer registration survey
Ask for availability in the shape of the rota, then for the two answers that decide whether someone can be given a shift.
Why this survey gets sent
“Two hundred people said yes. On the morning itself nine turned up, and I had no idea who could carry a box, who had first aid, or who I was supposed to call when one of them fainted in the sun.”
A sign-up list is not a rota. The distance between the two is three questions: free when, exactly; doing what, exactly; and who do we call if something goes wrong. Ask them at registration and the coordinator spends the week before the event assigning people instead of chasing them.
What is in it
- Name, phone, and an email only if they have one
- When you are free — days and shifts (multiple choice)
- What you would like to help with (multiple choice)
- The languages you can help visitors in
- Where you have volunteered before (long answer)
- Who to call in an emergency, and their number
- The code of conduct, read and agreed (required)
About 5 min to answer
Volunteer registration survey
About 5 min
How to write this survey
Ask for availability in the shape of the rota
Volunteers do not have availability; they have windows. “Are you free on Saturday?” gets a yes from the person who can give you ninety minutes at eight in the morning and a yes from the person who is yours from noon until the lights go off, and a rota cannot tell those two apart. Offer the same blocks your rota is built from — weekday mornings, weekend evenings, the setup day — and let people tick as many as are true.
Put setting up and clearing away on the list even though nobody volunteers for them by name. Those are the shifts that stay empty, and they are the ones that decide whether the event starts on time; a person who ticked the box on the day they registered is far easier to keep than one you telephone on the Thursday before.
Ask what someone will do, not what they are
“Tell us about your skills” produces paragraphs nobody can sort. A list of the jobs you actually need doing produces a rota. Write the options as the work — reception and sign-in, carrying equipment, interpreting, first aid — because the volunteer is choosing how to spend a morning of their life, not describing themselves.
Where a claim carries a duty, ask for it in the words of the claim: “first aid (I am certified)” is a different tick from “I stay calm in a crisis”, and only the first one can be put next to a medical box. Keep languages as their own question — somebody who speaks three of them is useful on the door whatever else they can do, and a language buried inside a skills list is a language you will not find at eight in the morning.
The two fields that must not be optional
An emergency contact exists for a day you hope will never come, which is exactly why it is left blank whenever it is optional. Make it required and say in one line why you are asking: heat, ladders, crowds and long days are the ordinary risks of volunteering, and a coordinator holding a phone with no number to dial is the avoidable part of a bad afternoon.
Ask for the name and the number as two fields rather than one. A single box comes back saying “my brother”, and a name with no number is no better than an empty box. Collect nothing further: an emergency contact is not an opportunity to gather a second household's details, and saying so on the page is what gets the field filled honestly.
Put the code of conduct on the page, not in an attachment
A code of conduct that lives in an attachment is a code of conduct nobody has read. Put the four lines that matter directly above the box that asks people to agree: turn up or tell us, follow the coordinator on site, keep what you hear to yourself, do not speak for us in public. Four lines are read. A page is filed.
Make the agreement a required yes or no rather than a box that arrives already ticked. The point is not the record you keep; it is the half-second in which a first-time volunteer reads what is expected of them and decides. If your programme works with children or with patients, this is also the place to say that a separate check follows — before the first shift, never after it.
What you send back within the hour
The reply is part of the survey. Anyone who has just handed you a Saturday should get a message the same day repeating what they picked, naming the coordinator and saying when the rota arrives. A week of silence is how a list of two hundred becomes a morning of nine, and avoiding it costs one confirmation message.
Leave the registration open after the rota is published instead of closing it: volunteers drop out, and a survey that is still live is a replacement list you did not have to build. Take the phone number in a phone field so every number arrives in the same shape — a clean column of them is what the coordinator works from on the day, and a number written out in words is a number nobody can dial.