Out of the box, the signup form asks for a name, email, and phone number. Custom signup fields let an opportunity ask more — a t-shirt size, an emergency contact, “can you drive?” — with the answers stored on each signup where coordinators can see them.
The field library
VolunteerPress → Form Fields holds your questions. The top section lists the built-in fields every form starts with — First name, Last name, Email, Phone. You can rename any of them, and make Last name and Phone required, optional, or hidden; Email and First name are always required, because email is how a volunteer is recognized across signups.
Below that is the Field library — the reusable questions. Add field creates one with a label, an optional help text, a Required toggle, and one of four types:
- Text — a single line.
- Paragraph — a longer answer.
- Choice — volunteers pick exactly one from options you list, one per line.
- Checkbox — a yes/no tick.
A field’s type is fixed once it is created — answers only make sense under the type they were collected as. Everything else stays editable. Fields are never deleted, only retired: a retired field stops appearing on forms and in the picker, but every answer volunteers already gave is kept.
Attaching fields to an opportunity
Each opportunity chooses which library questions its form asks. On the opportunity’s edit screen, open the Signup form fields panel in the sidebar, and use Add field to attach questions from the library; arrows reorder them. They are asked after the built-in fields, and the choice saves with the opportunity — there is no separate save button. An opportunity with no fields attached asks only the built-in name and contact fields.
Volunteers’ answers appear on each signup: open VolunteerPress → Shift signups, choose View details on a row, and the Signup form answers section lists every question and answer.
Why reuse one field instead of making near-duplicates
The library exists so the same question is genuinely the same field everywhere. Attach one “T-shirt size” field to five opportunities and every answer lands under one label, comparable across all five — you can read any signup’s details and know you are looking at the same question. Five separately created “T-shirt size” fields would be five unrelated questions that happen to share a name. Reuse first; create a new field only when the question is genuinely new.