Call for Volunteers
Designed a volunteer recruitment experience that helped event organizers recruit, review, and onboard volunteers without leaving Whova.
Company
Whova
Role
Lead Designer
Duration
3 months
Problem
Many Whova organizers operate with small, understaffed teams. They depend on volunteers to handle operational roles like attendee check-in, session support, wayfinding, and guest assistance, allowing their core team to focus on running the event smoothly.
Whova already offered basic volunteer management—organizers could manually add volunteers and assign them to supported roles—but adoption was low. We investigated why and found the bottleneck wasn't managing volunteers; it was recruiting them. Organizers simply didn't have the bandwidth to find volunteers in the first place.
Why is this worth solving?
64 %
of organizers need volunteers for their events
Volunteer recruitment was happening entirely outside of Whova. Organizers relied on personal networks, email chains, and Google Forms to recruit volunteers—a process that worked, but was completely disconnected from the platform. It had also become one of the most frequently requested features from organizers
Filling this gap wasn't just about feature completeness. Because Whova's customers run annual events, contracts are renewed every year, making retention a constant challenge. Every planning task organizers completed outside the platform gave them another reason to consider alternative event management tools.
Customer retention
Bringing volunteer recruitment into Whova made the platform more integral to the event planning process, reducing reliance on external tools and strengthening long-term retention.
Research
Through our research, we found:
70% of organizers (Out of the organizers who need volunteers) struggled to recruit enough volunteers
Most organizers relied on Google Forms and email
Not because they were ideal, but because they were fast and familiar
Design goal
From our research, we mapped the volunteer journey into three stages:
Recruit volunteers
Review and select applicants
Manage volunteers during event
For this MVP, we focused on the missing front half: helping organizers recruit and select volunteers, as Whova already supported part of the third stage.
With 70% of organizers struggling to recruit, the design question wasn't whether to build this — it was how to make it fast enough to actually replace their existing workflow.
💡 Every part of the experience needed to feel as quick and approachable as the tools organizers already used, or there was no reason to switch.
Key decisions
Remove the blank page problem
Organizers compare every new setup flow to the tools they already use. If creating a volunteer application takes longer than Google Forms, adoption suffers.
To minimize setup time, every application starts with the most common volunteer questions, drawn from our analysis of real volunteer applications. Organizers can remove unnecessary questions or add others from a question bank, but the default is ready to publish.
We considered starting with a blank form and suggested questions, but requiring organizers to build the form upfront created unnecessary friction. By optimizing for speed over flexibility, organizers could get up and running in minutes—making them more likely to adopt the feature and return to it for future events.
Turn existing platform data into a recruitment advantage
Once the form was ready, organizers still needed people to send it to. The initial design led with a shareable link — the standard approach for any form tool. But a shareable link offers no advantage over Google Forms. It still puts the burden on organizers to figure out who to send it to and how.
We shifted to making email the primary sharing channel, specifically because Whova already held attendee data from current and past events. Organizers could reach potential volunteers directly from the platform without rebuilding a contact list from scratch — and recruiting from past attendees is how most organizers find volunteers anyway. That's something no standalone form tool can offer, and it gave organizers a concrete reason to run recruitment through Whova rather than around it.
Build for two types of reviewers, not one
My initial design displayed full application responses in the list view — operating on the assumption that organizers would read everything carefully before making a decision. Early feedback revealed that most organizers were skimming, not reading. They wanted to make quick calls on the majority of applicants and only dig in when something stood out.
That changed the design significantly. Rather than showing full responses upfront, the list view surfaces only the most critical information — name, availability, preferred role. The full application is still a click away for organizers who want it, but the default is built for the reviewer who just needs to move quickly.
Bulk acceptance handles the high-volume workflow without forcing organizers to process applications one by one. For organizers doing a more careful review, nothing is hidden — the depth is there when they need it. Accepted volunteers automatically flow into Whova's existing tools with the appropriate permissions, so the handoff from recruitment to event day requires no additional work.