GUEST POST // Digital Waivers for Volunteers: 5 Things to Consider
By Daryl McCarl of Smartwaiver
Whether you’re planning a fundraising event or a regular form of your nonprofit programming, you likely rely significantly on the time and labor donated by your dedicated volunteers.
Those volunteers are important to you and your mission, so it’s imperative that you consider any risks that they assume every time they come to an event or your office to volunteer.
That’s where waivers come in handy—many nonprofits have their volunteers sign a waiver at the beginning of their volunteering engagement. A waiver protects both you and your volunteers, which helps to preserve your relationship and enables you to continue working with each other far into the future.
Now, you might already be using volunteer waivers, but adopting digital waivers can take safety and liability protection to the next level while also making them easier for volunteers to sign and for you to manage.
If you’re thinking about making the switch to digital waivers, we’ve put together a quick list of things to consider. Specifically, digital liability waivers:
Require volunteers to acknowledge risks.
Protect your organization from liability.
Encourage overall health and safety.
Are convenient for volunteers and organizers.
Provide valuable data insights.
Digital waivers, whether signed remotely via mobile device or on-site using an easy to set up waiver kiosk, offer a powerful and convenient solution for volunteers and organizers alike.
1. Digital waivers require volunteers to acknowledge risks.
It’s impossible to predict the future, and, as in most things, almost every volunteer activity or program involves some inherent risk.
For example, there might be a risk that a volunteer could be injured while using equipment, participating in a physical activity like a walk-a-thon, or working with animals. More recently, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, volunteer organizers now have to be acutely aware of a new risk—exposure to the virus.
The bottom line is that sometimes, all you can do is expect the unexpected and give volunteers the opportunity to acknowledge the risks they’re assuming by donating their time to your organization.
Again, the easiest way to do this is through a digital waiver provider. There are a couple things you can do with a digital waiver to ensure that volunteers learn about and acknowledge the risks:
Design your waiver so that signers are unable to move forward with the registration or check-in processes until they’ve read and acknowledged the risks.
Require signers to watch a safety video or read a list of risks before they sign.
When you give volunteers the chance to become fully aware of their risks, they’ll be grateful for your transparency. By having them sign a digital waiver, you’ll be showing them your organization values honesty and cares about their safety while they’re donating their time.
2. Digital waivers protect your organization from liability.
Waivers protect your nonprofit from any potential liabilities that may arise because of risks volunteers encounter during your program or at your event, which will help you should any legal problems arise with a volunteer.
Digital waivers are legally binding, meaning that when they follow certain specifications, a court has to recognize their legitimacy. Those specifications include the following:
The waiver must be accessible to the signer.
The signer must give their consent to sign the digital form.
The waiver is presented in an unalterable digital format.
Once your waiver fits these requirements, the agreement between you and your volunteer can protect you from liability should the volunteer be harmed while volunteering. This is good news for you, because legal battles are costly. And the last thing you want is to empty your organization’s pockets of precious funds that could further your mission.
A digital waiver can protect you in other ways, too. You won’t have to worry about losing a form if you end up needing it, because it will be ready for you to access in a secure database.
And you can easily associate signers with their identities. For example, Smartwaiver’s online waiver software offers Auto Photo Capture functionality. Having a photo to connect to your volunteer’s signature adds another level of liability protection.
As the steward of a meaningful nonprofit mission, it’s better to be safe than sorry when it comes to liability issues. Why not protect yourself with a simple digital waiver?
3. Digital waivers encourage overall health and safety.
COVID-19 has made us all a little more conscious of what we’re doing every day to keep ourselves safe and healthy.
And instead of ditching waiver-signing in the name of avoiding illness, go digital. Digital waivers can go a long way in helping people to stay healthy.
For example, contactless digital waiver forms allow volunteers to sign their waivers hands-free—effectively removing an unnecessary touchpoint at which germs can be shared. Plus, you’ll eliminate the number of pens/clipboards that have to be passed around your office and then sanitized afterward.
Digital waivers also allow volunteers to social distance and reduce lines for registration/check-in, giving organizers an easy way to continue following safety protocols.
4. Digital waivers are convenient for volunteers and organizers.
Besides health and safety concerns, paper waivers present a few annoying realities:
They require paper—lots of paper.
They take a long time for volunteers to flip through and fill out. And it’s likely you’ll get a pile of waivers back with missing information which you’ll have to spend time tracking down.
You have to store them, which likely means that if you need to access a specific waiver, you’ll be heading to a room full of filing cabinets.
But digital waivers take these stressors out of the picture, making it easy for you to focus on safety for your nonprofit and your volunteers.
Instead of dealing with all those papers, you can have volunteers fill out an online waiver in seconds, often before they arrive for a shift or event. With the right software, volunteers can navigate to your digital waiver on your nonprofit website or directly from an email link or QR code. And then, if you need to see a volunteer’s waiver, you can search for it quickly in a secure database and get the information you need in seconds.
5. Digital waivers provide valuable data insights.
With digital waivers you’ll be able to gather information that your organization can then use to improve how you operate.
According to this AccuData guide to data marketing, “Data-driven marketing is the practice of basing your brand’s marketing and communications strategy on the quantitative information you’ve gathered on your audience.”
Digital waivers are an extremely effective way to gather that data, allowing you to optimize your volunteer program over time based on how individuals are actually engaging with your waivers and programming. And targeted volunteer communications are better for building relationships, increasing volunteer retention, and providing the best role matches for your volunteers.
You can use a waiver to collect the data you need to communicate in more targeted ways, such as:
Name and age
Contact information
Gender
Engagement history
Then you can use this information collected from your waivers to create more complete volunteer profiles and make the most out of your nonprofit CRM.
Volunteers come to your organization wanting to have a positive experience serving your mission, so it’s important you take the time to get to know each of them and optimize their experience however possible. Digital waivers can get you the information you need to do so—all while protecting you and your volunteers from legal issues.
All in all, digital waivers allow for a better volunteer experience. And when you improve your volunteer experience, you increase engagement and retention. That means you get more help furthering your cause and your supporters get more opportunities to serve.
This guest post was written by Daryl McCarl.
Daryl McCarl is the Director of Business Development at Smartwaiver, the leading digital waiver service trusted by thousands of organizations around the world. www.smartwaiver.com
