Managing Volunteer Waivers

Many nonprofit organizations rely on volunteers to accomplish their mission, which brings up questions of how to manage volunteers. The aspect of volunteer management we would like to focus on is liability waivers. It is very important to always review your waivers and consent processes with your legal advisors. Percolator does not provide legal advice, but we can discuss various aspects of waiver management and technology solutions to manage liability waivers.

The first step of waiver management is delivering a waiver to the volunteer. Paper waivers that require manual signature have been a popular choice in the past but are not recommended today. It is difficult to automate the sending and receiving of paper waivers and without automation, staff face a heavy burden in manually managing the waiver signature process. Paper waivers can be easily lost and will need to be manually scanned and uploaded to Salesforce for storage.

Another way of managing the signature process is by using online consent. There are two methods that are often used for this type of online consent: Clickwrap and Browsewrap. Clickwrap is a method of obtaining consent with a clear action taken (i.e. requires clicking on something before proceeding), Browsewrap is implied consent and usually involves having language stated on the screen along with a link that can be optionally clicked on. Learn more about Clickwrap vs Browsewrap here.

This type of consent can be built into your process using Salesforce tools such as Screen Flows and Digital Experience sites. If you have a Digital Experience site, you have the ability to display the waiver on your website and use either Clickwrap or Browsewrap to have volunteers agree to the waiver. This means you do not have to pay for any third party tools or manage any Salesforce integrations.

Developing your own waiver within Salesforce directly is not the only method of gaining online consent. Using a third party tool such as DocuSign, Nintex Docgen, or FormAssembly can facilitate the process of receiving online consent. These tools allow you to distribute the waiver in multiple ways such as embedding it on your website or sending a link to volunteers via email. Many of these tools also have a Salesforce integration, which helps automate the waiver signing process that significantly lightens the workload of staff. The setup of third party tools can often be more straight-forward and they provide excellent options for signature verification. Some of our clients have received legal advice requiring signatures and signature verification methods that these kinds of tools can provide. Third party tools come with an additional cost, so if you want to take this route, you will want to research the current available options carefully and/or contact us to discuss recommendations specific to your use case.

When accessing waiver data from within Salesforce, it is typically advised to have fields on objects such as the Contact object to hold information about the waiver. This makes it easy to run reports on waiver information such as the following:

• Which volunteers have singed a waiver

• Date of the most recent waiver signed

• Content of the waiver signed

• Type of waiver signed (i.e. activity-specific, age-specific)

Waivers for volunteers under 18 years of age need special attention since most organizations require that minors gain consent of a guardian prior to volunteering. Waivers for volunteers under 18 years of age should require signers to include the following information at minimum:

• participant name

• parent/guardian name

• signature legal guardian

Though the content of waivers for volunteers under 18 years of age may differ from other waivers based on the advice of your legal team, the delivery and management of those waivers typically follows the same process as any other waiver. If you are interested in discussing your waiver signing process, please feel free to contact us; we would be glad to help you explore your options.