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Training Ideas, Resources, Tools

Five Strategies to Shut Down Volunteer Conflict

As every volunteer manager knows, your mission is BIG! It takes a lot of creativity, funding, and work from staff and dedicated volunteers to accomplish. But what happens when those very volunteers detract from your efforts instead of supporting them? Are some volunteers in a heated conflict with one another or, worse, in conflict with you and maybe even the direction of your organization? As a volunteer manager, how would you respond to such a negative but entirely possible scenario?

In this feature story, Marla Benson, creator of the Volunteer Conflict Management SystemSM, offers five key strategies to manage volunteer conflict before, during, and after it occurs. 

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Herding Cats (Or How to Facilitate a Great Learning Experience for People With Very Different Backgrounds)

Reva Cooper

What do cats have to do with training?

As a trainer, it is often easier to facilitate sessions when the group has similar experiences and similar levels of expertise or starting points. Yet there is a richness of knowledge and experience that diversity can yield. Cats are not naturally herding animals, and to get them to come together as a group can be challenging. In this Training Designs, author Reva Cooper shares what she has learned about training groups when participants are at very different starting points. Her experiences and insights will no doubt stimulate your own thoughts about facilitating and “herding cats” so that differences are honored and everyone learns and grows through the training experience. 

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Falling on Deaf Ears? The Psychology of Giving Advice

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. 

 

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Book Clubs: Not Just for Neighbors Any More!

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.

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Falling on Deaf Ears? The Psychology of Giving Advice

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. 

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Increase Reflection in Training to Enhance Transfer of Learning

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.

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Volunteer Engagement as a Form of Transformational Leadership

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.

 

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Advocating for Volunteers by Educating Staff

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.

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Tricks and Tips to Help Learners Learn from Each Other

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!

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A Beginner’s Guide to Developing Volunteer Training Videos

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.

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