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How to Add Participants to Golden

Adding participants to your Golden Dashboard is fast and easy, with multiple functions designed to save you valuable time. Golden also has the highest sign-up rates of any volunteer management software platform—our conversion rates are actually higher than Amazon's! That's because it's super easy for participants to sign up.

In general, most organizers fit into one of three categories, each with their own best practice approach. Let's dive into what works best for you.

"I'm a School or Company"

If you're using Golden to manage your employees or students, you'll want to track their participation in participant opportunities—including those hosted by other nonprofits using Golden. Here's how:

Step 1: Invite Your Affiliates
When you invite employees or students to affiliate with your organization, Golden sends them an email invitation. Once they confirm their affiliation, you'll be able to track all their Golden activity, whether they're participating with you or with other organizations on the platform.

This affiliation tracking is key to understanding your team's overall participant engagement across Golden!

"I'm a Nonprofit Trying to Recruit Participants"

If you're hosting or sponsoring participant opportunities, here's what we highly recommend:

Create Opportunities First, Then Share Them!

Why start with opportunities? Because participants are much more likely to engage when you invite them to take action—like signing up for a specific opportunity—rather than asking them to create an account first.

You can share your opportunities through:

  • Email newsletters
  • Social media
  • Your website

When participants sign up for their first opportunity, they'll automatically create their accounts, and they'll appear in your Participants list. It's that simple!

Here's a short video on how to share an opportunity: [insert video link]

Your participant engagement roadmap:

  1. Create participant opportunities
  2. Share them with your network
  3. Participants create profiles on their own when they sign up!

For more targeted strategies, check out: How do I target my Opportunity for a specific company, school, or group?

"I Have Volunteer Data to Migrate from an Old System"

Great news! Golden offers assisted data migration for organizations on an Enterprise plan, priced by quote based on your data. Just email us at support@goldenvolunteer.com and we'll have you up and running in no time.

"I Want to Create Private Opportunities for Segmented Groups"

Here's how to set that up in your Dashboard:

  1. Create a Custom Group
  2. Click into the new Group
  3. Click "Add Group Members"
  4. Upload a spreadsheet of the relevant participants

Note: This will trigger an email to your participants informing them they're members of the Group and directing them to claim their accounts. Here's what they'll receive: [insert example email screenshot]

"But I Just Want to See All My Participants in My Participants List!"

We understand the impulse, but we don't recommend this approach for a few reasons:

  1. Disappointing first impression: If you haven't created opportunities yet and invite participants to create accounts, they might be disappointed that there are no immediate actions to take—or worse, they might feel confused and not engage at all.
  2. Extra work without the payoff: It creates additional work for you without directly leading to more participant registrations.
  3. Better engagement: Creating opportunities first and promoting sign-ups for those leads to more participant registrations and fewer questions!