Volunteer Sign-Up: 8 Ways to Get More Volunteers

Volunteers play a critical role in achieving an organization’s goals. They’re the oil that keeps the machine running! Every nonprofit always needs volunteers and will always need more. So, how can you get more volunteers to sign up? What can you do to ensure a smooth volunteer sign-up process?

There are a few steps to take and strategies to try when it comes to making volunteer sign-up as efficient and successful as possible. In this article, you’ll learn practical ways to increase your volunteer sign-ups—including strategies to encourage more people to do so and ways to optimize the process.

The Importance of an Efficient Volunteer Sign-Up Process

Whether it’s efficient or it’s clunky, your volunteer sign-up process directly impacts your ability to recruit a committed volunteer base. 

When you have a streamlined process (more on that later!), your potential volunteers can easily express interest in volunteering, understand what their roles will be, and get involved without any unnecessary delays.

If potential volunteers face challenges or barriers—common ones include complicated or outdated systems, unclear instructions, and overly long or mobile-unresponsive forms—this can deter them from signing up. 

By prioritizing a streamlined volunteer sign-up process with clear expectations and next steps, you can alleviate confusion and frustration and make sure volunteers feel valued.

8 Strategies to Increase Volunteer Sign-Ups

In the nonprofit world, attracting and retaining volunteers is essential to making your mission happen. But getting people to sign up can be a challenge! 

From streamlining your sign-up process to leveraging social media, these strategies will empower your organization to attract more volunteers, get them to sign up, and build a strong, engaged volunteer community.

1. Make Volunteer Sign-Up Easy

It’s a tried and true theory: the easier something is to do, the more likely it is that people will do it. 

Volunteer sign-up is no exception! If your sign-up process is simple, clear, and doesn’t take too much time out of anyone’s day, you’ll get more people signing up.

Provide concise, easy-to-follow steps and a simple sign-up form to make volunteering a breeze for anyone who’s interested. 

2. Power Your Process with Technology

When it comes to volunteer sign-up, tech-powered is the way to go. No offense to paper sign-up sheets or spreadsheets, but they can get lost, leave a lot of room for error, and simply don’t have the helpful capabilities that a CRM does. 

Your nonprofit CRM should make volunteer sign-up easier for you to manage and for potential volunteers to complete. 

With a CRM system in your toolbox, you can go beyond storing volunteer data. You can monitor campaigns that attract the most volunteers, maintain volunteer profiles complete with their interests, skills, and communication preferences, and track information about your most engaged volunteers and how they interact with you.

To learn more about Neon CRM’s volunteer management capabilities, join us for an upcoming group demo!

If you’re already using Neon CRM and want to maximize the system for your volunteer sign-up process, there’s a Neon One Academy course on Volunteer Management available just for you.

3. Streamline Your Sign-Up Forms

What makes a volunteer sign-up form “streamlined”? Streamlined forms are simple, efficient, and effective. They collect only the most essential information about a volunteer and don’t take very long to fill out. 

Streamlined forms are also designed to reduce barriers to entry, such as consuming too much time or not being optimized for mobile. Mobile optimization is super important—54% of all web traffic now comes from people using mobile phones! 

To get more potential volunteers to complete your sign-up process, ensure that it’s as simple as possible and accessible on all devices.

4. Partner with Local Organizations

Connections are everywhere. You never know where in your community you could be introduced to a new person who wants to volunteer with your organization. 

To spread the word about your volunteer opportunities, consider reaching out to:

• Corporate partners. Connect with a local business about bringing their employees to volunteer or promoting your volunteer opportunities to their clients or customers.
• School programs. Partner with a school to attract student volunteers. Universities and other schools are ripe with programs that want to fill their calendars with volunteer days.
• Community networks. The parent groups, church groups, and clubs in your community often volunteer together. Reach out to let them know how they can volunteer with your organization and where to sign up. 

5. Put the Volunteer Link Everywhere

If someone wants to volunteer with your nonprofit, they should never have to look high and low for where to sign up. Make it plainly obvious and super visible by putting it everywhere—and we mean everywhere!

Craft email campaigns to encourage sign-ups. Make the link to your volunteer sign-up form easy to find on your website. Add a QR code that links to the form on your event and other print materials. Add it to your list of “link in bio” links on social media.

Because people are people, chances are someone will still miss it, but make that very hard to do!

6. Utilize Social Media

Social media is a great way to meet people—including potential volunteers—where they are. Regularly call for volunteers on social media, sharing any volunteer opportunities or certain projects you have coming up that need volunteers.

Engaging content is another great way to attract volunteers and encourage them to sign up through social media. You can share videos, photos, and stories that highlight volunteer impact and show (not just tell) people why they should sign up to volunteer.

7. Host Volunteer Interest Events

This may sound old-school, but volunteer interest events can still be an effective method for meeting potential volunteers and encouraging sign-ups. And in 2024, we have even more ways to do this, thanks to technology!

Consider hosting virtual webinars where potential volunteers can attend an online session that explains your cause, the volunteer opportunities involved, and what they need to do to sign up.

Additionally, an in-person Open House event at your office or another venue is the perfect way for people to learn more about your cause, engage with your team, and express their interest in volunteering.

Q&A sessions, whether hosted online or in person, allow people to ask questions and get the details they need before signing up to volunteer.

8. Use Online Volunteer Platforms

Another point for technology: We now have volunteer websites where nonprofits can post volunteer opportunities and sign-up links the same way corporations post jobs on LinkedIn or Indeed!

Increase your volunteer sign-ups by posting your volunteer roles on platforms like VolunteerMatch, Idealist, and Points of Light Engage. You already know that the people who are registered on these platforms are interested in volunteering—it’s time to recruit them to your team.

Job sites can also be a good place to post volunteer roles. Just remember to optimize your listings with relevant keywords to increase visibility and make it crystal clear that your listings aren’t paid roles.

Manage Volunteer Sign-Up and More with Neon CRM

We discussed the power of a great CRM to make volunteer management easier and more efficient. Now, dive deeper into the many features available in Neon CRM to help you engage your supporters, including highly customizable forms, volunteer time tracking, communication tools, and so much more.

Attend a no-pressure group demo with our team to learn more about Neon CRM! We’ll walk you through the platform and answer any questions you have about volunteer management features and other tools available within Neon CRM.

Register today to join us for an upcoming demo!