Easy, Free & Online Volunteer Sign-Up Tools
Volunteer Recruitment
hidden for layout purposes
A good volunteer sign-up tool in our context should
- be free to use
- be easy to set up and use
- give you the core functionality to create a basic sign-up sheet
- let you export your sign-ups as a CSV spreadsheet as part of the free package
There are numerous free sign-up tools out there. The upside is, you have choices, one of them being forms.google.com. The downside is, you have yet another provider to deal with, leading to information fragmentation. We are introducing a few of them to you; all of these require an account, and some of them have limited functionality in their free version.
You can do a search on “free volunteer sign-up” and get variations of SignUp Genius(see also below). There typically is a catch that involves functionality in the free version.
Collapse All
VolunteerSignup
VolunteerSignup: Completely free service and site, no ads. VolunteerSignup was created by TRAFx Research Ltd. of Canmore, Alberta, Canada. You are required to create an account, and there are no possibilities for customization on the actual sign-up sheets you are creating.
What we liked: no ads, clean interface. Truly free. Simple to use.
What could be improved: no opportunities to customize anything; mono-lingual English.
[Click here to close]
SignUp Genius
SignUpGenius: Free version offers a certain core functionality. This website offers sign-ups not just for non-profits, but also schools, sports teams and more. Once you have created an account, you will not only see sign-ups you have created in your dashboard, but also those you have been invited to, making it a little bit more contained.
When creating a new sign-up, even the free version gives you some limited customization options, such as free themes to choose from. You may upload your own image(s) as well, but this requires enabling Flash Player. All in all, we found creating a new sign-up pretty straight-forward, since the site uses a wizard-like tool to help you accomplish this.
Time slots include one-time to “no specific”, so you can use this to run a donation drive online, as an example. There is also an import function, which comes in handy if you want to utilize an event that was previously conceived or run with the help of a simple spreadsheet. Only sign-ups with a specific date or date range can have email reminders, which makes sense.
SignUp Genius allows you to specify the information respondents are going to be asked to enter, and once people have signed up, you can export their information to a CSV.
This is what the finished sign-up looked like utilizing the free version of SignUp Genius:
The only thing that was configurable here was the picture to the left of the title, which could have been a logo. Ads are included, unless you decide to pay up.
What we liked: a lot of configuration options even in the free version. Full ability to export any sign-ups to CSV, send reminders and more.
What could be improved: Ads are one thing, but the ones forced upon you in the free version are downright intrusive. Also, many of the themes included are pretty ugly and cannot be further customized, even if you have a premium account.
[Click here to close]