Three Volunteer Training Systems Your Ministry Needs
Every ministry trains its volunteers.
But does it work?
Most leaders conduct volunteer training events at the beginning of the semester and then fool themselves into thinking that this will effectively train volunteers to do the ministry's work.
Listen, I love training events.
Your Team Nights, Serve Conferences, and ad-hoc seminars are great. But you are deceiving yourself if you think that a few events are going to holistically train your team to do the complicated ministry God has given you to do.
You don't need another event.
You need more systems.
Systems scale. Events don't.
Systems work for the entire year. Events don't.
Systems are easily moved to another campus. Events don't.
Systems are cheap. Events usually aren't.
If I were you, before you plan your next Team Night that 60% of your team attends, I'd invest in building volunteer training systems.
Here are three I'd start with:
System 1 - Appreciation Workflows
Remember, what gets celebrated gets repeated. Every time you show appreciation to people when they do the things your ministry values, you train them to do it again. Volunteer appreciation is essential for training your team. But how do you ensure every volunteer receives this type of celebratory training? I'm glad you asked because this is where the volunteer training workflow comes in handy.
The Volunteer Training workflow is a process cue that puts every volunteer into a three-step process to ensure that each volunteer receives three touches of appreciation in a ministry here.
It's a super simple and scalable system for you to set up. I can show you how. Let's hop on a free coaching call here.
System 2 - Online Training Courses
Need a scalable way to train your volunteers? Well, one of the best investments you can make in your ministry is building out online training videos with quizzes to train your volunteers throughout the year.
We coach leaders to build three levels of training for your team.
Level 1 - Entry Level Training
Level 2 - Issue Specific Training
Level 3 - Leadership Team Level Training
You might think you need a big budget or a video editing team to make this. But you don't. Anyone with a phone can build these. In fact, I wrote an article called How To Make Basically Free Online Volunteer Training Videos.
You can read it here:
https://www.simplystrategicministry.com/blog/freetrainingvideos
System 3 - Leadership Pipeline of Peer Coaching
You can't coach every volunteer. Sure, it may be easy to provide on-the-job coaching to 5-8 volunteers personally. But if you want to scale your coaching abilities, then you need to scale who is able to coach. At SSM, we coach leaders to build a leadership pipeline with different levels of leadership who help you scale your on-the-job coaching.
For example…
Volunteers lead themselves.
Team leaders lead others.
Coaches lead leaders.
I believe creating a coach level in your ministry is essential for creating a well-trained and cared-for team. We did a podcast on creating volunteer coaches called: Small Group Coaches, Scaling Groups, Building For 1000, and Job Descriptions.
You can watch it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzFNj-GaPJY&t=489s
Want help building these out? Our team of coaches would love to talk more with you. To get on their schedule, simply sign up for a free coaching call here.
I hope this helps! ⚡️
Landon Reynolds