Training Ideas, Resources, Tools

A core goal of all leaders of volunteers is to ensure that volunteers have a great experience. If you are directly managing the volunteers yourself, that goal can be structured and achievable. But in larger organisations, where the responsibility for managing and supporting volunteers is delegated to specific departments, ensuring a consistent volunteer experience can be more difficult. One way to address this is to provide training to non-volunteer engagement colleagues who are supervising volunteers.  

This Training Designs provides practical training exercises to equip non-volunteer staff with the knowledge and skills needed to help create great volunteer experiences. Developed by the head of volunteering development at The Myton Hospices, Warwick, Warwickshire, these exercises have been used successfully to help staff gain a better understanding of volunteering, provide clarity around staff roles and responsibilities for supervising volunteers, and give ideas to manage volunteers well. The exercises are designed to be fun, generate discussion, share best practices, and be memorable. These exercises have worked for many leaders of volunteers - and they can work for you, too.

Humor is personal, but so is learning. And humor can be a welcomed training tool when it comes to training.

In this Training Designs, Erin R. Spink interviews Tane Danger from the Theater of Public Policy (known as T2P2), an innovative group that seeks to enhance learning through improvisational comedy. T2P2 has a track record of using humor and improv to break down complex issues for learners – and create what T2P2 calls “learning disguised as entertainment.” Through this interview, Spink reveals how volunteer managers can use humor in training, too.

The majority of e-Volunteerism readers are leaders of volunteers and many of us play a significant role in training volunteers. But should that be the case? In this Training Designs, editor Erin R. Spink asks some tough questions about the role that leaders of volunteers play in training volunteers. By looking into what she calls “the trouble with training,” Spink offers insights into why and how this could look different.

It's the holy grail of all trainers – more interaction! But how do you increase interaction if you continue to use your typical orientation and trainings methods?

In this Training Designs, author Sammy Feilchenfeld introduces "Poll Everywhere" – a free plug-in tool for PowerPoint^® that lets you to ask questions and get answers live. Using a number of resources, this Training Designs article will showcase a few different ways you can use Poll Everywhere to connect with volunteers in training sessions. Feilchenfeld explains that volunteers only need their phones to participate via web browser or text, and reviews how volunteer managers can work with their live responses. This Training Designs will no doubt help you deliver the highly engaging trainings you strive to create while interacting more with your volunteers.

Technology tools designed to lighten our workload abound online, but the options can be overwhelming. Some productivity tools may be specifically intended for nonprofit leaders. Others, while aimed at broader audiences, may also be useful for those working with volunteers. 

When every day is packed with demands, who has time to explore all the resources available to determine which are most useful? How can you know which will actually help you become more productive and be worth the time investment to master the learning curve?

In this Along the Web column, Faye C. Roberts helps answer these questions by exploring popular tech tools that can ease the time crunch for volunteer managers. And in keeping with the limited budgets of groups that depend on volunteers, most of the tools Roberts discusses are free or low in cost.

This e-Volunteerism feature provides an important introduction to a new collection of volunteer resources and written materials recently produced by CNIB, an organization previously known as the Canadian National Institute for the Blind that will celebrate its 100^th anniversary in March 2018. The materials include a series of manuals, toolkits, and training guides on a range of topics—all designed to enhance the volunteering experience with CNIB.

According to writer Jennifer Spencer, a team of CNIB employees assembled these materials on a wide range of topics, including advocacy, fundraising, being a program ambassador, and how to create a culture of volunteerism. This new collection of volunteer resources and materials is available on CNIB’s website. “This was purposefully done to make the material as accessible as possible, and to allow people from different organizations to adapt and tailor the manual for their needs,” writes Spencer. “By sharing these materials with the wider e-Volunteerism audience, we hope that you will be challenged not only to borrow from our resources but to create your own.”

As volunteer managers struggle with a lack of time, the hours spent on volunteer training typically shrinks. The up-front investment in a volunteer decreases dramatically, depriving volunteers of a crucial connection with the organization’s mission.

In this Training Designs, Meridian Swift—a well-known volunteer manager, author, and blogger—explores why training should be embraced as an investment that will influence a volunteer's future commitment. Through this article, Swift will help volunteer managers discover ways to manage the time they need to make this investment. 

Volunteer recruitment messaging is long overdue for an overhaul. But what wording works best? This Training Designs article will walk you through the technique of “testing” messages to determine which are most effective with different audiences. You’ll learn how to design and develop your own recruitment test using a simple A/B (split testing) method that Training Designs Editor Erin Spink has used successfully. Through this article, you will have all the tools you need to design your own tests. And you’ll be on the way to improving future recruitment results.

Some years ago, Debbie Mason Talbot, a hospital-based manager of volunteer resources, and Ann M. Heesters, director of bioethics at the same institution, came together to discuss a series of cases that generated moral distress for their volunteers and for those who supported them. Though these cases arose in a hospital setting, it quickly became evident that Talbot and Heesters had uncovered themes that would be familiar whenever volunteers interacted with clients, patients, staff, or managers. Talbot and Heesters realized that what they soon called “boundary dilemmas” were not new or local issues, but perennial problems that could be addressed more easily once a common vocabulary was established to discuss the cases and the factors that made them ethically troubling.

In this e-Volunteerism feature, Talbot and Heesters use case studies to explore boundary-crossing situations and organizational responses to them, case studies that can be applied to volunteer situations in a myriad of settings. They also review a tool called FaCE-IT to help analyze boundary dilemmas in organizations and methods to deal with them. As the authors write, “Volunteers who are made aware of the language of boundaries are better equipped to identify potential dangers and to make informed decisions about ethically troubling dilemmas. They will be better prepared to distinguish helpful behaviors from those that have the potential to cause harm.”