This guide highlights issues involved in increasing participation in welfare-to-work programs and offers advice and best practices for achieving higher participation levels. Part 1, "Introduction," has three sections that discuss the importance of participation, summarize major points, and introduce the guide. The seven sections of Part 2, "Setting the Stage," discuss the following: calculating welfare-to-work program participation; summarizing participation requirements of the 1996 welfare law; presenting barriers to high participation rates; reviewing welfare reform approaches and their effects on participation; examining the relationship between participation and program effectiveness and between sanctioning and participation; and discussing how increasing participation affects program costs. Part 3, "Getting People in the Door," discusses typical orientation attendance rates and reasons people do not attend and then describes strategies to improve program outreach, as well as intake and follow-up. Five sections in Part 4, "Keeping People In," discuss the effect on participation of case management practices and offer guidance on monitoring participation and enforcing the participation mandate, motivating participants, reducing periods of inactivity, and meeting support service needs. Part 5, "Reaching Deeper into the Caseload," has three sections that describe the hard-to-serve and how to identify them, strategies for increasing participation among them, and program approaches to elicit participation from them. Provisions of the 1996 federal welfare law are appended. Contains 55 references. (YLB)