How I helped event organizers recruit 120% more volunteers
The business problem: customer retention
Whova is an event management platform for professional conferences and summits. We faced a persistent retention challenge: most professional events happen annually, and customers sign year-long contracts. When contracts are up for renewal, customers can easily switch to competitors.
We recognized that making Whova more comprehensive would strengthen customer loyalty. If we could support more of the event planning process, organizers would be less likely to leave. One significant gap was volunteer recruitment and management, a pain point we knew caused major friction for organizers but didn't address yet in our product.
The user problem: no bandwidth to recruit volunteers
Most event organizers who use Whova don’t plan events for a living. They're nonprofit leaders, office staff, or university teams juggling event planning on top of their regular work. As they often work in small, resource-strapped teams, volunteers help take a lot of work off their plates.
However, recruiting volunteers is a lot of work, and organizers don’t have the bandwidth for it. What ends up happening is organizers don't get enough volunteers or skip them completely. The organizing team then has to take on the additional tasks.
Role
As the lead designer, I led the end-to-end design of a volunteer management feature over 6 months
Collaborated with a researcher, PM, engineers, and executives
Impact
Adopted by 17% of events
Helped organizers recruit 120% more volunteers per event
Deep dive: the process
Initial research: understanding pain points and existing workflows
I partnered with our researcher to understand how organizers currently recruit and manage volunteers through surveys and in-depth interviews. We found they needed volunteers but struggled to find enough, as recruitment took too much time and often fell behind other priorities.
of organizers need to recruit volunteers for events
of organizers who need volunteers have trouble with recruitment
Key steps in volunteer recruitment and management:
Set up and promote applications
Review and select volunteers
Coordinate volunteer shifts and roles
We’re always short on volunteers... I end up doing stuff myself.
Whova event organizer
Defining the MVP: balancing user needs and limited resources
I worked with our researcher to present our findings to product, engineering and leadership, mapping the entire volunteer management process to highlight where organizers faced the most friction. This helped us visualize all the opportunities we could tackle to make recruitment easier.
Constraints emerged after discussing opportunities:
Leadership wanted to launch quickly to stay competitive and support nonprofit organizers, who were facing government funding cuts and could really use the help of more volunteers.
Engineering had limited bandwidth for about 3 months of development work.
We couldn't build everything, so we had to prioritize. While I would’ve liked to build a complete solution, I recommended focusing on recruitment first. After all, you can’t manage volunteers if you don’t have any. Plus, solving the "no time to recruit" problem would deliver the most immediate value.
Defining success: how will we know if this solved the problem?
I talked with PM to clarify what success would mean for this feature. Since this was a brand new feature, we needed metrics that would tell us if it was worth investing in the next milestone.
Design challenges
01. Application form setup: designing the most effortless setup experience
The first challenge was making form creation as easy as possible. If setup was too much of a hassle, organizers would drop off before even seeing the rest of the feature.
I explored two approaches:
To inform the direction, I analyzed 10 volunteer application forms from various conferences. The pattern was clear: most forms asked similar questions such as name, email, phone, availability, past experience, and motivation.
On top of that, when presenting to stakeholders, they raised a business concern: we needed to prevent organizers from repurposing this free tool to recruit speakers (a paid feature). To do this, we had to add a limit on custom questions. This limit was much easier to implement with the pre-populated approach.
02. Sharing the form: methods that fit naturally into existing workflows
The organizers now have an application form. Great! But now they need to make sure volunteers see it.
I explored multiple sharing options based on what we knew about organizers’ current workflows:
Emailing past and current attendees
Embedding the form on websites
Posting on social media
Using a shareable link
To narrow down the features we should provide, I discussed with PM and engineers to evaluate each option on impact and feasibility. Engineering raised two key concerns: security risks and development scope.
Emailing attendees offered the highest impact since Whova already had their contact data, but it came with potential abuse risks—organizers could exploit it to mass-message or spam attendees.
To balance value and risk, I proposed a compromise: allow emailing only the current and one past event, with guardrails and best-practice guidance to prevent misuse.
For websites and social media, building separate tools for each would have extended development time. To cut down on development time, I suggested just having the single shareable link for this release. It would work for both use cases, letting organizers promote the form widely without adding scope.
My recommendations addressed engineering concerns while keeping the feature high-impact and efficient to build.
03. Review dashboard: accommodating two use cases
The final piece was enabling organizers to review applications and accept volunteers efficiently.
Initial design: I started with essentials—name, email, role, status, and a link to the full application. This kept the interface lightweight and focused. I also had “Accepted,” “Waitlisted” and “Rejected” as status options.
However, testing this design revealed nuanced needs:
Some organizers have to make quick decisions, as there's no time for detailed reviews.
Others preferred more in-depth application reviews before accepting.
Rejecting someone volunteering their time felt uncomfortable.
The main challenge for me was accommodating two use cases: organizers who make quick decisions and organizers who look at applications in detail.
What I changed: I surfaced key decision-making information (such as availability and experience) directly on the dashboard for quick scanning, while keeping the link to full applications for those who wanted deeper review.
Before
Volunteer name, email, date applied, and role surfaced
After
Volunteer name, role, availability, past attendee experience surfaced
I also simplified the workflow to just Accept and Pending statuses, removing the awkward rejection action. Organizers could simply ignore applications that weren't a fit, or save them as backups.
Before
Pending, Waitlist, Rejected, and Accepted statuses
After
Pending and Accepted statuses
The final designs for accepting volunteers:
Post-launch results
We hit our adoption target and helped organizers recruit 120% more volunteers.
Organizers also responded with enthusiasm. Here’s what they’re saying:
Next steps based on conversion funnel:
After launch, I analyzed the conversion funnel and usage patterns:
Strong setup and sharing completion
Minimal drop-off between activation, form completion, and sharing—good news for our design approach ✓
Discoverability gap shows growth opportunity
Discoverability of the feature was limited. With only one entry point, many users missed the feature.
In future milestones, we’ll explore additional entry points in relevant areas of the platform — like the event setup checklist and attendee management sections — to surface the feature where organizers are already working.
