Training plays a critical role in ensuring that volunteers are informed and equipped with the necessary directives, skills and tools needed to fulfill their role inside your organization. Without proper training (organization orientation and technical training) volunteers often feel overwhelmed, confused and ill prepared for the tasks they’re assigned. This can lead to frustration, lack of motivation or worse, lack of confidence in the organization. When people don’t understand how to be successful, they don’t stay. This leads to high volunteer turnover and lowers the impact you can make in your community.
If you want to build an impact army of volunteers, it’s important to provide them with a baseline of what impact means to your organization. That’s why we recommend beginning day one of volunteer training with an orientation about YOU.
Volunteers cannot be expected to make the right kind of impact if they don’t fully understand your mission, vision, culture, constituent base, services/programs and goals. By conducting orientation training, you set the expectation of what it means to represent your non-profit and how everyone, volunteer or staff, should conduct themselves and their work.
Good Intentions
Volunteers mean well. We firmly believe that. We also know that every person comes to you with varying levels of education, moral compass, style of speech, home environments, restraints on their time, and many more life factors. Therefore, a person cannot be expected to walk off the street and immediately know how to function at your brand standard.
This goes for people who may have fulfilled this same role at another non-profit. They know how to do the work the way they were taught and that may not be the way that best aligns with your brand standard. It doesn’t make them a bad person or a bad volunteer. It simply means that without proper orientation training, they will do the very best they can with the knowledge they currently have. That knowledge may not align with your goals. Set the expectation day one; before they start working on tasks.
Teach Volunteers How to Be Successful
If you want people to function a very specific way inside your organization, we recommend beginning every volunteer journey with Orientation Training.
Need More?
We’re just beginning to scratch the surface on how to effectively train your volunteers. If you’d like to learn more about how to train and retain volunteers, I encourage you to get started building your Volunteer Management System today. If you need a little help getting started, try downloading our Volunteer Training Templates.
These Canva templates are plug and play. That means we guide you through creating your volunteer success training. Click the graphic above and get immediate access to the training templates you need to create your Volunteer Impact Army.
