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Volunteer badge maker

Badges that say which team someone is on and when they are working, printed from the final rota.

Open the volunteer badge makerSee all templates

No signup. No watermark. Your data never leaves your browser.

VOLUNTEER
Jane Smith
Registration
Saturday AM

About the volunteer badge maker

A volunteer badge answers a question a name badge does not: what is this person doing here, and are they on right now. Put the team on it and any attendee can find the marshal, the first aider or whoever is running the kitchen without asking three people first.

Rotas change until the last minute. Somebody drops out on the Friday, two people swap shifts in the car park on the Saturday morning, and three more turn up because a friend said you were short. A badge printed a week early is a badge you will be reprinting.

So the design and the data are separate jobs. The starting layout is 3.5 × 2.25 inches with a name, a team and a shift, which fits a clip-on holder that pins to a fleece. Build it in advance, import the rota last, print on the day.

Your badge data stays in your browser. Names, spreadsheets and photos are never uploaded, and never reach any analytics. Your work is saved on this device only.

Start here

Templates for this

Each one opens in the editor with the fields already set up. Change anything you like.

What goes on a volunteer badge

Name{{name}}
A first name is usually enough. Volunteers get approached by strangers all day, and a first name is the friendlier version of that exchange.
Team{{role}}
Kitchen, marshals, registration, first aid. Set it nearly as large as the name — an attendee looking for help is scanning for a word, and the name only matters once they are already talking to you.
Shift{{shift}}
Which block they are working. On a two-day event it stops somebody being asked to cover a gap three hours after they went home.
Coordinator phone{{phone}}
The same number on every badge, small, along the bottom. Radios run out of battery and a volunteer who needs help should not have to find someone who knows the number.

Anything in double braces is filled in per person. Put {{name}} on the badge once and it becomes every name on your list.

How it works

Four steps, and none of them is signing up.

  1. 1

    Design it before the rota is final

    Lay the badge out a week ahead with placeholder names. The design does not change when the rota does, so this is the half of the job you can safely do early.

  2. 2

    Export the rota as a CSV

    One row per volunteer, with name, team and shift as columns. If your rota is a grid with a column per shift, flatten it first, or you will get a badge per shift instead of a badge per person.

  3. 3

    Import it on the morning

    Import the version that is actually true. Completely empty rows are skipped, so the gaps left by people who dropped out do not turn into blank badges.

  4. 4

    Print, sort by team, hand them out

    Print at 100%, cut, and split the stack into teams before anyone arrives. A volunteer hunting through 80 badges for their own is a volunteer who starts twenty minutes late.

Teams, shifts, and printing on the morning

Volunteer rotas are never finished. Someone is ill on the Friday, two people swap Saturday shifts between themselves and tell nobody, and a couple more turn up unlisted. Treat the design and the data as separate jobs and none of that is a problem: build the badge in advance, import the rota last, print once.

Print the whole set on the morning if you can. Eighty badges is about four sheets and five minutes of printing, and it is worth doing at the venue if there is a printer there. Bring a few blanks and a marker for the walk-ups — a hand-written badge on the same card as everyone else’s looks intentional, while no badge at all makes a helpful stranger look like they wandered in.

Put the team on the badge in a size somebody can read from a few metres away, not as a subtitle under the name. If you are colour-coding teams, give each one its own background and keep every other element exactly where it was, so the set still reads as one set rather than as four different badges.

Shifts are worth printing when the day is long enough that two people share one job. Morning and afternoon, or 9–1 and 1–5, is the right level of detail; printing exact minutes only invites arguments about when a shift ended. If somebody is doing two shifts, give them one badge with both on it rather than two badges to keep track of.

  • Design early, import late — the rota is the part that keeps changing
  • One row per volunteer, not one row per shift
  • Team in large type, name a size down, coordinator number along the bottom
  • Print spare blanks for the people who turn up unlisted

Questions

No. It is free with no account and no watermark, whether you are badging twelve volunteers or four hundred.

Add a shift column to your rota — Morning, Afternoon, Saturday AM — and map it to the shift field when you import. Every badge then carries the block that volunteer is working.

Yes. Change the background colour, print that team, then change it and print the next. Keep everything else in the same position so the badges still look like one set.

Print a few blanks with the name and team left empty and fill them in with a marker, or add the person in the editor and download a single 300 DPI PNG to print on its own.

The design, yes — it is saved in this browser on this device, so reopen it next year and import the new rota. The printed badges are only worth reusing if you put them in holders and collect them back at the end of the day.

Where to next

Make your volunteer badge now

The editor opens straight away. Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for.

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