Days of service

Screen the whole crew before the day of service

9/11 Day of Service. United Way Day of Caring. A corporate team of sixty who confirmed ten days ago. Days of service bring more volunteers through your doors in one morning than the rest of the quarter — and almost none of them are known to you. Screen every one for $5, with most results back in minutes.

Start screening — free to set up See pricing

No subscription · No contract · Credits never expire · FCRA-compliant

The densest month in the service calendar

Four national moments land within three weeks of each other, and each sends a wave of first-time volunteers into organizations that are already short-staffed.

Hunger Action Month

All month · Orange Day Sept 5

Food banks and pantries run their heaviest volunteer month of the year — warehouse sorting, mobile pantries, and home delivery routes, largely staffed by groups who have never been there before.

Food bank volunteer screening

9/11 National Day of Service

September 11 · 25th anniversary in 2026

Congress designated September 11 a National Day of Service in 2009, with AmeriCorps leading the federal effort. Projects run all month: meal service, packing events, clean-ups, and school projects led by students.

United Way Day of Caring

Mid-September · dates vary by affiliate

The largest single day of volunteering in many communities. Corporate teams spend the day at local nonprofits — painting, landscaping, sorting donations, serving meals — often alongside the people those nonprofits serve.

Corporate & campus serve days

Year-round, concentrated in September

Employee volunteer days, campus service days, and church serve days bring a large group of strangers into your programs for a few hours, usually with no prior relationship to your organization.

Church & serve-day screening

Why one-day volunteers are the ones who go unscreened

Almost every organization screens its regulars. The gap is nearly always the group that shows up once — and it is a gap of cost and time, not of care.

Strangers, at scale, in one morning

A day of service is the one day you onboard more volunteers than the rest of the quarter combined — and almost none of them are known to you. The people you'd normally get to know over months arrive, work a shift, and leave.

No time for a three-week process

Traditional screening takes days and costs $25–$80 a person. When a corporate partner confirms 60 volunteers ten days out, that math is what stops the screening happening at all.

Same access, shorter shift

Four hours with your after-school kids, your senior clients, or inside a family home is the same access as four months of it. Risk does not scale down with the length of the shift.

Partners and funders increasingly ask

"We screen our regulars but not day-of-service groups" is a hard sentence to say to a corporate sponsor, a grantmaker, or an insurer — and it is the honest answer at most organizations today.

The maths that decides it

Nobody chooses to leave volunteers unscreened. They arrive at it, one budget line at a time. At industry pricing, screening a single corporate crew costs more than most volunteer programs spend on everything else in a quarter — so the check quietly becomes optional. At $5, the decision stops being a budget question and goes back to being a safeguarding one. See the full pricing or read what a $5 check includes.

Traditional screening · $45 each$2,700

VolunteerBadge · $5 each$300

A 60-person corporate crew, screened once. Industry pricing of $25–$80 per check is what makes screening episodic volunteers unaffordable — and why it usually doesn’t happen at all.

Screening sixty people without sixty conversations

Send one link to the whole group

Create a shareable application link or QR code and hand it to the team leader. Every volunteer completes their own application, FCRA disclosure, and signed authorization on their phone — you never collect Social Security numbers by email or spreadsheet.

Checks run as people sign up

A clear national criminal search typically completes in minutes, so a crew that registers the week before is cleared long before the van pulls up. $5 each, and only for volunteers who actually finish.

Know your roster the morning of

Your dashboard shows exactly who cleared and who is outstanding, so the team leader can be told plainly which volunteers can take the roles involving children, seniors, or home visits.

What experienced coordinators do

Ask the corporate or campus partner to send the link with their own sign-up email — response rates are far higher coming from the employer than from the nonprofit.
Screen the roles, not the headcount. A group painting a fence outdoors is a different decision from a group reading with children.
Open registration two weeks out. Most volunteers finish within 48 hours, which leaves time to chase stragglers instead of making a judgment call at 8am.
Keep the record. A cleared volunteer costs nothing to reuse, so repeat corporate teams are free the second year.
Decide in advance what an unscreened walk-up can do. A defined role beats turning willing help away — or waving them through.

One thing worth deciding early: a background check is a decision aid, not a door policy. Pair it with two-adult supervision, name badges, and a sign-in sheet, and you have a day of service that stands up to scrutiny. Our Trust Center explains exactly what the search covers — and what it does not.

Questions coordinators ask

Do one-day volunteers really need a background check?

It depends on the role, not the duration. A volunteer stacking pallets in a warehouse is a different risk from one serving in a youth program, sitting with seniors, or entering a client home — and a four-hour shift gives the same access as a four-month one. Most organizations screen episodic volunteers whose roles involve children, vulnerable adults, home entry, or handling money and personal data.

How fast can we screen a group of 50?

Send one shareable link and volunteers complete it on their own phones, usually within a couple of days. A clear national criminal search typically finishes in minutes, so the practical limit is how quickly people fill in the form — not our turnaround.

What does it cost for a large day-of-service crew?

$5 per volunteer, and only for volunteers who actually complete their application. No platform fee, no subscription, no contract — 50 volunteers is $250, and credits never expire, so anything unused rolls into your next event.

Can the corporate partner pay for the checks?

Yes. Many companies cover screening as part of sponsoring the day. You can buy credits and invoice them, or switch on the setting that lets each volunteer pay their own $5 when they apply.

What if a volunteer shows up unscreened on the day?

Decide that policy before the morning of, not during it. Most organizations keep a set of roles that need no check — outdoor work, setup and teardown, kitchen prep away from clients — and route unscreened walk-ups there. You neither turn away help nor place someone unvetted with a child.

Is this FCRA-compliant for volunteers?

Yes. Every check is consent-first: the volunteer receives the FCRA disclosure and signs an authorization before anything is searched. If a report contains records, the adverse-action workflow — pre-adverse notice, waiting period, final notice — is built in, along with the volunteer’s right to dispute what it says.

What does the $5 check actually search?

A national criminal search across county, state and federal court sources, every state sex-offender registry plus the national registry (NSOPW), and federal watchlists including OFAC and FBI Most Wanted. Records that surface are reviewed by a trained person before they reach your report.

Running a specific kind of service day? See food bank, homeless shelter, disaster relief, or fall festival screening.

Your next day of service is closer than you think

Set up your organization free, send one link to the group, and know exactly who cleared before anyone puts on a t-shirt. $5 a volunteer, no subscription, credits never expire.

Get started free

Questions first? Trust Center · How it works · Pricing