Your volunteers enter information about themselves when they register on your site. Who chooses what questions they are asked and whether an answer is required? You do!
The Basics of User Registration
The two basic options are to make it quick and simple for your volunteers - or gather some key information at registration by requiring that fields be completed. You can:
allow volunteers to skip steps (or require all steps)
decide which of the steps you want volunteers to see or not see
decide which pieces of information are important to you and your organization.
This article walks you through the details: Your Connect Site’s User Registration Form.
Let’s look at some tips on choosing the right option for you.
Adding or Removing Steps
Does requiring all steps sound like more than you want to require of your volunteers? Even if you require them to complete all steps, you have some flexibility about what those steps are.
You can decide if you want to include any or all of these as a step
Select Causes
Select Interests
Select Agencies
Complete Qualifications
Each of these is at your discretion. Most site managers will want to learn the volunteer's skills. Qualifications are less common but can be important if you need a volunteer to have specific qualifications in order to see or respond to a need. For example, if you need them to have CPR certification. (If you're not sure what qualifications are yet, no worries, we’ll cover that in a later section.)
Standard Options
On the user registration setup page, you can even select the individual pieces of information you want. You can select what shows up at registration, what the volunteer can add within their profile page, and what is absolutely required.
You decide what is important to you or your local United Way.
If you check everything for the Profile column, the volunteers are able to provide lots of details about themselves within their profile page.
However, you might only want to make a few of these items appear at registration, and perhaps even fewer should be required. This image shows the first few rows of info configured in this way:
All volunteers are required to give their name and email address. Any other required info is up to you. (Bear in mind that some people might be sensitive about providing their birth date, age, or gender.) In a later step in this course, we will discuss custom questions - which are a great way to collect some specific data.