Guardians creating Minor accounts
Eli Poulos
Hi Holly, thanks for writing in!
I appreciate you bringing this kind of situation to our attention, as we are always trying to improve how our platform communicates with volunteers.
I'd like to know a bit more about this situation, so we can come up with some ideas about how to best address it! It sounds like the parents are creating their account and responding to an opportunity on behalf of their child, and the way they are doing it doesn't create the circumstances where they would be presented with the minor waiver. Am I understanding correctly?
It's possible that this could be helped by communicating that minors (age 13-18) would need a separate account, preferably at either when the parent is creating their account (with a required registration question), or else when they are trying to respond to the opportunity (with a qualification). This way, they would be told (and possibly required) that their child would need their own account before they are actually able to create a response on their behalf.
Let me know if I am missing anything here, and I'd also be happy to get more specific with solutions if I'm on the right track!
Have a great day,
Hi Eli,
Thanks so much for responding -- yes, I think the key may be communicating this better during the process of creating the account.
I was able to add a custom page when the waiver is being signed, so the waiver says "parents, check here first!" and directs them to http://volunteer.everymeal.org/youth-volunteers/for-parents-of-youth-volunteers/
I am also interested in how a required registration question would work? Thanks for the good ideas!
- Holly
Eli Poulos
Hi Holly, thank you for following up! I think this is a great solution. As far as a custom registration question, I was thinking something like this may be effective, as it would make sure that everyone who creates an account on your site using the standard registration form would at be aware of how they should create their account:
How to set it up:
How it would appear in the form:
I'm happy to get into more detail here, if you'd like to talk about this in more depth, I will likely move this conversation to a support ticket so we can talk more about the specifics of your site. Thanks, and let me know if you have any questions!
Hi Eli,
Thanks so much for taking the time to think about this issue we are having. I also appreciate knowing more about how a required registration question works (it's difficult/scary for us to test this kind of thing without messing up our site and confusing volunteers).
The trouble is that parents will continue to create accounts on behalf of their children. I think we just need to communicate to them that the information (date of birth, mainly) needs to be their child's (so as to trigger the minor waiver). So far it seems like this "please read" page is working ok for our purposes!
Thank you again!!
Eli Poulos
Happy to help! As you test this workflow and learn more about how your volunteers are interacting with this information, you may come up with other product suggestions to help clarify this. If you think of anything, please don't hesitate to reply to this thread with any new enhancement requests!
Have a great day!
Holly Daniels
Hello!
Lately we've been having more youth volunteer teams and we've been experimenting with different ways to handle it (e.g. having youth create accounts, versus having them come with paper waivers signed by their parents)
A trend we are dealing with regarding youth accounts is that the guardians are the ones creating the accounts for their kids. There are a few patterns with the ways this goes wrong:
- The guardian, confused, creates an account with their name and info, and signs the Release Form, and then when they go to register they include the note: "this registration is for my child." Legally, we do not believe we are covered if the child is injured in our warehouse because their name is nowhere on the Release Form or corresponding volunteer account.
- The guardian creates the account with the minor's info but doesn't put the minor's name into the Release Form -- the guardian either signs their name once or twice, lol.
I don't think there's a great reason for why they're so confused. And I don't necessarily have a solution for this issue, but thought y'all might be interested to know about the prevalence of helicopter parents and how that could potentially affect user experience design!
Thanks,
Holly