Volunteers will stay longer and work better for your non-profit organization if you can match their personalities and passions with appropriate tasks. Could a simple quiz help you to ensure your volunteers are matched up with the kind of work they'll enjoy for the long haul?
Check out a few of the many self-administered quizzes and questionnaires available on the Internet, designed to help prospective volunteers find opportunities to suit their personal work style, skills, interests, and goals.
3 Quizzes to Learn Your Volunteer Profile
What Kind of Volunteer are You?
Woman’s Day magazine’s website offers a 10-question interactive quiz to help you discover what kind of community service is the best match for your personality.
What kind of Volunteer work should you do?
WeTV’s interactive quiz has ten multiple-choice questions that ask what you’d do in a certain scenario. I found the results less than useful, but the process of working through the questions did give me some insight into what type of service I most enjoy doing.
What Kind of Volunteer Are You?
Oprah wants to know! The five multiple-choice questions in this brief interactive quiz “will tell you... the types of opportunities you are likely to find most rewarding and where you are most needed.” Sceptical? Don’t be! This turns out to be one of the better general-audience volunteer profile quizzes online, and honest responses to those 5 questions can be rewarded with surprisingly helpful (and detailed) results.
A Quiz for Eco-Volunteers
What's Your Volunteer Type?
Planet Green’s 10 multiple-choice questions have an environmental slant, and a truly beautiful interface. Actually, this quiz is much more of a teaching/awareness-raising tool for the environmental movement (and for specific green charities) than it is a self-discovery tool for potential volunteers. Non-profit marketers and volunteer coordinators might want to take a close look – and I’d love to hear your reactions in the comments!
A Quiz for the Career-Oriented Volunteer
Readiness Quiz
“Canada’s biggest job site,” Workopolis gives would-be volunteers a simple list of eight questions – no Web 2.0 here, but a practical questionnaire designed to help you nail down your expectations of the volunteer experience. For example, what time commitment are you willing to make? Would you like to develop specific skills? Do you want to volunteer from home or at an organization?
3 Quizzes for Young Volunteers
A Volunteering Quiz
Gurl.com’s multiple-choice volunteering quiz is firmly aimed at teens, and some parents and teachers may not be comfortable with the content or language used in all of the nine questions here. “Help me help” is the text link to click for results – but the “analysis” presented to all three of my teen quiz-testers was no more than a simple link to the homepage of VolunteerMatch.org – technical glitch or missed opportunity?
What’s Your Perfect Volunteer Experience?
KidzWorld’s 8-question interactive quiz would seem to be intended for American pre-teens, but in fact the target audience is quite unclear. One question assumes familiarity with Mother Teresa, Albert Einstein, PETA and Earth Day, but another (“When you meet someone new, what do you do?”) offers multiple-choice responses more appropriate to a very young child (e.g. “give them a BIG hug” or “get excited and start jumping up and down”!). The quiz itself could use a content makeover, but you will find a number of quite useful resources linked from the results pages.
Volunteer Profile Quiz: What's Your Style?
YouthNoise invites readers to “answer these ten questions, and figure out your volunteering destiny.” You won’t find any technology bells-and-whistles here – just a list of questions – but the questionnaire is thoughtfully constructed and should make a great starting point for discussions and decision-making. In fact, this is easily the best of the quizzes I’ve found for younger volunteers, and it’s an excellent resource for would-be volunteers of any age.
Follow-up to the quiz, for those who are still undecided, includes more tools and resources for finding meaningful volunteer work:
As part of its extensive Lend a Hand online toolkit, YouthNoise also includes an interesting section on Service Learning – “a way to take the (sometimes boring) theories of the classroom and put them to work in real, tangible situations, usually to address a community need – that should be particularly useful for homeschooling families, forward-thinking schools, and youth groups looking for community-based projects. There’s even a page on DIY Service Learning, ideal for independent-minded and self-motivated teens or young adults.
What tips or resources have you found that can help a would-be volunteer (of any age) find an opportunity that suits his/her personality and skills?
Read More: How To Create A Volunteer Engagement Strategy that Actually Works