❖ Heads up! This article is only intended for Site Managers.
Are you looking to gather important information from volunteers when they respond to a Need or Opportunity on your site? Do you need insights into who’s volunteering and their motivations? Or perhaps your organization provides shirts or uniforms, and you need to know volunteers’ sizes in advance? Custom questions on the Need/Opportunity response form allow you to easily collect the details you need to stay organized and prepared!
Here are a few example questions you might consider asking:
How did you hear about this opportunity?
Is there anything you want us to know before joining us for this opportunity?
Do you have any preferences for snacks or lunch?
Have you had a fever or flu symptoms in the past 48 hours?
These questions appear on all Need or Opportunity response forms when a volunteer responds to a Need or Opportunity. Consider using these to gather information that might change over time, like whether someone is sick or if they want something specific for a snack.
These cannot be added to specific Needs or Opportunities, they apply to ALL.
ℹ️ So you know: Some sites have language overrides. This means you may see Needs instead of Opportunities, Agencies instead of Programs, or Prerequisites instead of Qualifications. You may also see different menu options from the ones displayed in the examples here, as every site is set up differently.
Getting Started
The custom response questions that you create appear on all Need/Opportunity response forms—they can't be applied to a specific Need/Opportunity. Since they appear on all Need/Opportunity response forms, consider what kinds of questions can be used universally! You can require them so that volunteers must answer them when responding to a Need/Opportunity or you can keep them as an optional step.
1. Go to Settings > Response Questions:
2. Click Add Custom Question:
3. Fill in the required fields with an asterisk (*):
There are five question types to choose from:
Small or Large Text Field: This question type provides a blank field for volunteers to type out their answers. You can use the small text field for smaller answers or the large text field to allow for more in-depth responses.
Dropdown: This provides a dropdown menu for the volunteers to choose from. Volunteers can only select one answer with this one.
Checkbox: This provides several answers that volunteers can check off. This is great if your question has more than one possible answer.
Radio Button: Like the dropdown option, this provides several answers with buttons for the volunteers to select. They can only select one answer with this option.
For dropdown, checkbox, and radio button, enter the answer options on separate lines in the Options field:
If you want to require this question on the Opportunity response form, toggle the button to On beside Required:
4. Click Save Custom Question.
Here's what the questions look like on the Need/Opportunity response form from the volunteer perspective:
Reviewing Response Question Answers
Want to see how volunteers are answering these response questions? You can export that data for review!
1. Go to Volunteerism > Responses.
2. Click Export Responses. This exports your Response data to a CSV, including volunteer answers to the response questions!
