Volunteer Training: How to Set Volunteers up for Success

To make your organization’s volunteer program as effective as possible, you need to give volunteers everything they need to succeed. Besides knowing how to do their jobs well from the beginning, many volunteers want to grow and develop their skills while supporting your organization. Thorough volunteer training helps your program accomplish both of these goals!In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about volunteer training, including:

• What is volunteer training?
• Benefits of Volunteer Training
• Volunteer Training Essentials
• Additional Volunteer Training Best Practices

Let’s begin by establishing what we mean by volunteer training and discussing how it fits into the bigger picture of volunteer management.

What is volunteer training?

Volunteer training is the process of instructing and equipping volunteers to perform well in their roles at your organization. It involves everything from communicating logistics and policies to helping volunteers learn how to complete various duties within and beyond their initial job descriptions.

Training Within the Volunteer Management Lifecycle

Volunteer training touches nearly every aspect of the volunteer management lifecycle. It’s most obviously present at the onboarding stage, since volunteers need to be trained on the correct ways to perform their roles before they can start volunteering independently. 

However, ongoing training also boosts engagement, and giving volunteers new opportunities shows that you appreciate them, which can lead to higher retention rates. Plus, if you advertise the benefit of learning and growing during recruitment, more volunteers may want to sign up!

Benefits of Volunteer Training

Prioritizing training as a key aspect of your volunteer program can provide many advantages for your organization, such as:

• Improving volunteer performance. Naturally, better-trained volunteers can complete tasks more efficiently and to a higher standard of quality, which helps your organization make a bigger impact on those it serves.
• Enhancing the volunteer experience. When volunteers have access to the right resources, they can accomplish their individual goals more easily and refine skills like communication and time management that they can transfer to their jobs and personal lives.
• Building community. Volunteer training usually doesn’t happen in a vacuum, so volunteers often become more connected to each other and your staff as they participate in learning opportunities.
• Managing risks. When volunteers know your policies and procedures, it typically reduces the number of incidents that could have negative consequences for your program and everyone involved (injuries, legal issues, etc.).

Plus, well-trained volunteers are more likely to engage more deeply and continue supporting your mission long-term, strengthening your program and organization as a whole.

Volunteer Training Essentials

Generally speaking, volunteer training can be divided into initial (onboarding) and ongoing phases. Let’s walk through the core components of each phase so you can develop your training strategy accordingly.

Volunteer Onboarding

The goal of volunteer onboarding is to get new volunteers up and running in their roles. While your exact process will vary depending on your volunteer positions and program structure, there are three major topic areas you should cover during onboarding—we’ll dive into each one in detail.

Mission & Organizational Culture

Most of your new volunteers probably decided to work with your organization to contribute to a cause they care about. The mission and culture portion of onboarding should drive home why they’re doing what they’re doing in their roles and get them excited about the opportunities your volunteer program offers them.

Some subjects to go over in this segment include:

• Your organization’s mission statement so volunteers understand it in depth and can explain it as needed when working with beneficiaries and other supporters.
• The values of your volunteer program and organization as a whole, which provide a guiding framework for everyone’s efforts.
• Your DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility) framework to reassure volunteers that everyone is welcome in your program.
• Engagement and appreciation practices, giving volunteers a sneak peek of the benefits of supporting your organization over time.
• A facility tour if you’re hosting training in person, so they know where everything is.

To cement this portion of volunteer training, set aside some time during onboarding to allow new volunteers to mingle with existing volunteers and staff. This way, they’ll see that your organizational culture isn’t just something you talk about in a meeting or online course—it’s something your team practices every day.

Policies & Procedures

Reviewing policies and procedures might sound like the “boring part” of training to you and your volunteers. However, it’s necessary to minimize risk and implement effective volunteer management practices.

Here are a few general guidelines you may cover in this segment of training:

• Safety information so volunteers don’t get hurt or find themselves in other dangerous situations while working with your organization.
• Attendance and scheduling expectations, such as how to share availability and what to do if a volunteer can’t make their shift at the last minute.
• Communication and reporting procedures, including logging hours, contacting program leaders with questions and concerns, and filling out other organization-specific paperwork.
• Dress code if you need volunteers to wear certain clothing for protection (e.g., closed-toed shoes or work gloves), identification (e.g., event volunteer t-shirts so you can easily distinguish between participants and workers), or professionalism (e.g., volunteers helping in your offices may be asked to follow the staff dress code).
• Other code of conduct information to ensure volunteers have positive interactions with each other, staff members, and the larger community.

Compile this information into a handbook of volunteer program policies and procedures. During onboarding, share the handbook with new volunteers so they can reference it later if they’re ever unsure about what they should be doing.

Role-Specific Information

Since different volunteers will need different role-specific training, this segment of onboarding is often best conducted through tailored online courses or hands-on work sessions. To demonstrate how targeted this segment needs to be, consider the following potential roles for animal shelter volunteers and the information each group has to know to succeed:

• Caring for rescue pets: What and how much to feed each animal, how to clean enclosures and litter boxes, how to walk dogs safely, how to play with all types of animals, what to do if a pet gets sick or injured.
• Assisting with marketing: How to take high-quality photos of rescue pets, what common communication cadences look like, which content creation platforms the shelter provides access to.
• Selling merchandise: How to sort and stock inventory, how to package online orders, how to work the register or point of sale system for in-person purchases.
• Helping with fundraising events: What supplies need to be set up, how to check attendees in, where to put everything during tear-down, how to handle other event-specific needs (e.g., enforcing silent auction bidding rules or timing a 5K race).

Consider having new volunteers shadow experienced volunteers during their first shifts so they can see how their job is done and get their questions answered by someone knowledgeable as they’re learning.

Ongoing Volunteer Development

Volunteers need to learn to execute their responsibilities well, but their desire to grow and develop their skills doesn’t end when onboarding is over. To address volunteers’ interest in continuous development, provide a variety of opportunities for ongoing training, including:

• A resource library where volunteers can access downloadable eBooks, articles, videos, and other materials within a dedicated volunteer portal or app.
• Online courses on specific topics that volunteers can work through at their own pace and earn badges or certificates for completing.
• Live training sessions—consider hosting these online and/or making them optional to attend to accommodate volunteers’ schedules outside of their shifts.
• Open lines of communication with program leaders and volunteers working the same shifts to provide quick answers to questions or solutions to problems.
• Mentorship programs to continue to develop relationships between newer and more experienced volunteers and help them learn from each other.

Ongoing training will also help your volunteers stay up-to-date on current happenings and trends so they can adapt and thrive as your program evolves.

Additional Volunteer Training Best Practices

Once you have the essentials down, incorporate the following best practices into your approach to take your organization’s volunteer training from good to great.

Make Training Tailored & Flexible

While every volunteer program should train volunteers on the general topics in the previous section, effective training isn’t one-size-fits-all. In addition to volunteers in different roles having different learning needs, individual volunteers differ in their:

• Ideal learning styles: Some volunteers prefer listening to guided lectures, some like to read through documents or watch videos at their own pace, and some don’t fully grasp concepts until they apply them to hands-on work.
• Availability and time commitment: Since training usually takes place outside of regularly scheduled shifts, some volunteers will have more bandwidth to dedicate to it than others, and they’ll have different blocks of time in which they can learn (e.g., volunteers who work full-time may be free nights and weekends, while stay-at-home parents might have more time to train during the day when their kids are at school).
• Desire for further skill development: While many volunteers want to grow in their roles, some are happy staying where they are for long periods of time.

As much as possible, build this flexibility into your training approach so volunteers can find the best methods for them. Also, collect feedback on which training formats are volunteers’ favorites and least favorites so you can capitalize on your strengths and focus less on methods volunteers don’t love.

Consider How to Onboard Virtual Volunteers

Approximately 18% of American volunteers—more than 13 million people total—volunteer remotely or in a hybrid setting. If your program includes virtual volunteer opportunities, you’ll likely need to adapt your onboarding approach to give them the full experience while accommodating their desire to interact with your organization primarily online.

Aside from formatting your onboarding sessions as eLearning courses or Zoom meetings, consider hosting optional virtual socials so remote volunteers can still meet each other and get a feel for your organizational culture. Then, ensure any other resources they may need are available online, and they can contact your team quickly if issues arise.

Provide Advancement Opportunities for Longtime Volunteers

To truly help volunteers learn and grow over time, providing ongoing training resources isn’t enough. You also need to open up opportunities for them to apply what they’ve learned as they serve your organization. 

Leadership roles like mentorship, supervisory positions, or being a go-to person for first-time volunteers to shadow are excellent advancement opportunities that almost any organization can offer. Depending on your mission and volunteer needs, you might also give experienced volunteers more difficult tasks or ask them to serve in higher-profile capacities, like helping with special events where important stakeholders will be present.

Don’t pressure volunteers to take on these new challenges if they don’t want to or don’t feel ready for them. However, letting them know that these opportunities are available and that you think they’d be a good fit can make them feel appreciated and motivated to continue serving your organization to the best of their ability long-term.

Use Volunteer Management Software

Effectively managing all aspects of volunteer training in the context of the rest of your program requires the right tools. When choosing volunteer management software for your organization, look for training features like:

• An eLearning module where you can develop independent training courses for various volunteer roles and embed multimedia content like images and videos.
• Customizable quizzes that let you adjust the questions, minimum passing grade, and number of allowed attempts for each assessment.
• Progress tracking via individual volunteer profiles so assessment scores transfer to your database automatically and you can always see where each volunteer is in the onboarding process.
• A resource library of documents, videos, and procedural information that volunteers can access anytime for ongoing learning.

Better Impact’s comprehensive volunteer management solution includes all of these features and more to help you train your volunteers. With a full suite of features that cover every aspect of the volunteer lifecycle from recruitment to retention, plus best-in-class customer support and a user-friendly interface, you can optimize your organization’s entire volunteer management process and help your program—and volunteers—thrive.

But don’t just take our word for it—check out our client case studies to see how real organizations like yours have strategically used Better Impact’s tools for volunteer training and beyond!

Wrapping Up: Additional Volunteer Training Resources

Thorough volunteer training doesn’t just set individual volunteers up for success—it also makes your volunteer program more effective overall. Use the tips in this guide to get started, and if you haven’t already invested in comprehensive management software or are looking for a change, know that Better Impact has everything you need to onboard and educate volunteers!

For more information on effective volunteer coordination and engagement, check out these resources:

• Volunteer Appreciation: Getting Started + 10 Top Ideas
• Volunteer Management Training: An Overview & Top Resources
• 18 Best Volunteer Management Software Tools for Nonprofits