Tag: Administration

We all want to host great volunteer training. We want our volunteers feeling valued, coming away with useful tips and ideas, and most of all, we want them to want to come to training! We want training events to be the highlight of their semester, quarter, or year! 

Here are three non-negotiables for great volunteer training:

1) Honor Volunteers’ Time

We honor volunteers’ time by starting on time, ending on time, and filling our time with useful and encouraging content. We don’t want volunteers leaving thinking “this could have been an email.” We want to encourage them, give them practical, applicable strategies to try, and communicate new information in an engaging way. 

If volunteers feel that training is a good and beneficial use of their time, they are more likely to return for future training events and encourage others to attend as well!

2) Honor Diverse Learning Styles

We know that our students have a variety of learning styles and preferences. When we teach our volunteers, we not only want to keep them engaged in our content, but we also have the priceless opportunity to model teaching to diverse learning styles. Using active learning techniques and keeping in mind the three basic learning styles (auditory, visual, and kinesthetic), we can build elements of interaction and diverse activities into our training time.

3) Honor Wisdom, Experience, and Contributions of Volunteers

Most churches have volunteers with a variety of experience levels. You can likely think of some seasoned, rock star volunteers. Give your volunteers opportunities to discuss and problem solve with one another. Allow your experienced leaders the time to encourage and share their wisdom with newer volunteers. I often find that many of the best ideas that come out of training sessions don’t come from me, they come from seasoned volunteers with a passion for ministry. 

Allowing seasoned volunteers to share and encourage others helps them feel valued, appreciated, and seen. 

There are lots of great ideas for volunteer training, but these three essentials can set you on the right course for training events that leaders love!