Training Ideas, Resources, Tools

We all know that volunteer engagement is rapidly changing. So it is critical that volunteer administrators continue to grow, learn new things, share ideas, and identify trends when it comes to professional development and staying relevant.

You may be surprised, but one way to do this is to take an old idea and give it a new twist: start a professional book club. In this Training Designs, authors Mary Ella Douglas and Melissa Gilmore share what they’ve learned about professional development through their efforts to create and sustain a book club. While a book club provides an incentive to read, the authors explain that it can also encourage discussion and networking while enhancing skill sets that are useful in volunteer management. The authors provide lessons learned, tips on developing a book club, and book club selections for this new twist on professional development tools.

Those who manage, lead, or work alongside volunteers often give advice to their teams, and may be surprised and perhaps frustrated when it's not acted upon. This can happen both in situations where volunteers have a lot of independence and authority to act on their own, but also when we try to encourage less experienced volunteers to make their own decisions.

In turn, volunteers may offer us helpful advice. Do we always receive it well? In this feature article, author Kirsty McDowell explores why understanding the ‘psychology of giving and receiving advice’ can help volunteer managers improve volunteer leadership practices and encourage people to act on their advice. 

Reflection is essential for learning. In order to “make meaning” of an experience, the learner must have an opportunity to reflect on or process the experience. To help ensure that program participants transfer learning and training experiences into real-world applications, we must be intentional about both engaging the learners and creating opportunity for meaningful reflection. 

In this Training Designs, author Anne Stevenson offers a variety of strategies and tools to help engage learners and embed more reflective learning into volunteer-centered workshops, meetings, or educational programs.

Here's an important addition to your advocacy toolbox. This Training Designs presents training resources to help you describe and demonstrate the power of volunteer engagement to peers and senior managers through the lens of “transformational leadership.” Newly-appointed Training Designs editor Erin R. Spink explains the theory of transformational leadership and the many commonalities it shares with volunteer engagement as a means to bring about significant change in both followers and the organization.

With the ideas and tools in this article, your presentations and training sessions can include the leadership language that is more familiar to senior management – a step that may open their eyes to what volunteer engagement can do for an organization and reinforce the value of your role and what you do.

We all know that an organizational culture that values volunteers and volunteer management is an ideal environment in which to engage citizens in important, meaningful service. But how do we foster this culture? One approach is to design and implement in-house training and advocacy to educate staff peers on the inner workings of effective volunteer engagement, including why volunteer management matters, how it results in better outcomes, and how they can more actively participate as partners with volunteer talent.  

This Training Designs offers tips and strategies for how leaders of volunteers can facilitate in-house education for their staff peers. Ideally, this will result in better staff-volunteer relationships, greater volunteer impact on the organizational mission, and an organizational culture that is more inclusive and appreciative of volunteers.

Adult learners bring a wealth of knowledge to any training session. But more often than not, they still expect the trainer to do most of the teaching. As trainers, we have plenty of information to convey, but we also want learners to interact with each other to reflect on the material and to offer different, unique insights to the group.

In this issue’sTraining Designs, Susan J. Ellis shares a range of group interaction techniques that she has used successfully to facilitate exchange among learners. She gives expert advice and pointers on:

• Tips for how to divide into buzz groups to stimulate varied discussion
• The importance of clear instructions – and goals – to breakout and buzz groups
• The power of 2s and 3s
• Nametags as conversation starters
• Scheduled “strategy exchanges,” both live and asynchronous
• To tweet or not to tweet

…and more!

Do you think that creating training videos requires special expertise, lots of time, and a big budget? Think again. Perhaps nothing has evolved so rapidly in useful technology than videography: every smartphone has the capability to produce quality video; camcorders today have come down in price as their functionality has increased; and online conversations using webcams can be recorded as videos.  

Patricia Wright, the director of volunteer services at Western Maryland Health System, recently began experimenting with homemade video as a tool for volunteer orientation and training. She is the first to acknowledge she’s a novice at the process, which is one of the reasons her article is so interesting. Wright explains why she began experimenting with video, the successes and not-so-successful outcomes of her first forays into videotaping, how even her first attempt upgraded her previous curriculum and ensuing discussion, and what she plans next. This Training Designs article includes links to relevant Web sites and YouTube videos to help you, too, develop your own training tools, along with a  list of available video content that’s useful to almost any kind of volunteer effort.

Not long ago, three Volunteer Centres in neighboring communities near the Waterloo-Wellington area of Ontario, Canada were all trying to provide top-quality training and professional development for their member organizations. After noticing that many topics of interest were the same in all three communities, representatives from each centre concluded that the combined resources of three centres were better than one. Which begged the question: Could they work together as a team to deliver the best possible training and education programs?

The answer was a big, resounding “Yes.”  A few months later, the seed that would eventually grow into the Waterloo-Wellington Learning Alliance (WWLA) was planted.

In this Training Designs, authors Sarah Daly and Joanna Michalski describe how the three Volunteer Centres worked together in 2010 to create a partnership benefiting all three of their communities. Though the authors admit that creating WWLA has been a “rollercoaster of learning curves,” they use this Training Designs to share examples of how community-focused collaboration strategies can translate into training and professional development opportunities that other volunteer organizations can benefit from and implement, too.  

The Training Designs feature of e-Volunteerism is based on the recognition that orientation, induction, and training are critical to the success of each volunteer and to the entire volunteer involvement effort. Great training starts volunteers on the path to positive service experience and helps provide the greatest benefit to the organization, too. In this issue, new Training Designs Editor Karin Davis begins her tenure with an article on how basic adult learning principles can enhance volunteer training. You don’t have to be an expert in adult development to understand and apply these principles, but knowing them will make you a more effective trainer.

Volunteers increasingly come to organizations with expectations that their involvement will be supported by the smart use of new technologies – during recruitment, induction, and in their actual volunteering. As shown in previous Training Designs, the Internet and video have the potential to revolutionize how we welcome and train volunteers and support their ongoing learning and development. In this issue, Laura Hamilton shares how George House Trust in the UK uses webinars and other e-learning tools to support the orientation and briefing of volunteers for one-off events and also to enhance organizational induction for all volunteers. Hamilton offers a step-by-step guide to successfully incorporate online learning from the start of volunteer engagement.