No two organisations are the same. Depending on the needs of your sports club you’ll want to recruit different people with different skill sets into roles of responsibility.
Firstly, you’ll have to understand the specific needs of your organisation to find the best candidates.
Secondly, identify what requirements they must have for that position. It could be a specific coaching qualification, experience in a similar role or even the availability to handle the tasks.
Once you have agreed on those factors you can begin to build an application form that can go out to all your members, and also be added to your website and social media.
Types of Volunteer Roles
Coaches and assistants – Given the responsibility of taking training sessions and games, but also in developing each other
Website admin – Responsible for website activities, maintaining content and design.
Treasurer and payment admin - Responsible for invoicing, managing subscriptions and reviewing revenue.
Scheduler - Responsible for inputting club fixtures and resource management.
Welfare officer - Responsible for managing the safety of children at the club.
Committee and Fundraising – Responsible for decision-making, driving revenue and long-term strategy.
Create Your Form
Your form will be specific to your club, but there will be some crucial data points that will be universal.
The form should have a balance where you receive all the information that you need, but also not so long that it becomes a barrier to entry for someone.
1. Create The Form
To create a form on 360Player, click Registrations and then Create.
Enter a Title and create a Category of ‘Applications’
Add a description about the form which lets the applicant know a little bit about the role they are going to apply for, the hours they’ll need to be available and the likely start date.
An additional attachment with a flyer, club logo or branding is a perfect feature to make your form look professional.
2. Add Form Fields
Next, you’ll want to add all of the data fields that you want to collect on the form. You can add ‘default fields’ or ‘custom questions’ that are specific to this form.
Personal Information
Start with the personal information that you will need from the applicant.
· Full Name
· Date of Birth
· Contact information (inc. phone number, email address)
Experience and qualifications
Find out what their past roles have been that make them qualified for this role or what qualifications they have that are suitable. This could take the form of Single Choice or Multiple Choice options like;
Which coaching qualifications do you hold?
How many years of experience do you have in sports accounting?
Do you have a current first-aid certificate?
Exactly what other questions you’ll need to add will be organisation-dependent but they could include things like;
· Availability
· Reason for applying
· Area of expertise
· Current job role
· Emergency contacts
3. Add products
When working with Registrations on 360Player you can add products which can be mandatory or optional for users to purchase when submitting, but for our volunteers form you can leave this area blank.
4. Submission email
When a user submits a registration form, they will get an email to confirm that the registration has been completed. Use this as a way to thank the applicant for their interest and also provide a time frame for the next steps that the organisation will take in reviewing and replying.
5. Visibility
Forms can be made available in a number of different ways, either open to everyone or hidden. For this volunteer form, you’ll need to decide whether you want just your club members to apply, or whether anyone in the general public can.
Setting this to ‘Public’ is a good way to widen the net on prospective volunteers.
6. Availability
While working on the form and making it fit for purpose, it’s best to keep it in a ‘Draft’ state so no one fills it out before you launch it. Then once you’ve tinkered with every element, added all the fields and branding you can set it to Open.
Set the form to ‘Require a 360Player account’ unless you want a user from outside the organisation to fill it out as a guest.
Sharing Your Form
Once it’s open, take the form URL and post it to your social media to get outside attention. Encourage all the club members to re-post and drive traffic towards the form so you get the widest possible coverage.
Internally, with the embedded form feature you can also add that URL to a club-wide wall post to create a smart clickable link for the member to visit in-app. This will give your members that push notification to click into the app, and read about the volunteer positions and hopefully engage in applying themselves.
You could also add that directly to your website behind a button that will redirect to the live form.
Dealing With Submissions
So, your form is live and drumming up internal and external interest, and now you have plenty of submissions to look through.
Click on ‘Registrations’, then find the form you’ve created.
Click ‘Submissions’ and you’ll find all the users who have applied along with all the data points you’ve requested.
You can filter those answers down to find the best candidates for the role and then communicate with each one on the platform to organise a face-to-face meeting to discuss the position further.
With all these automations, finding volunteers who can then use 360Player to perform their roles efficiently is super easy!
