Training Ideas, Resources, Tools
Susan J. Ellis and Her Legacy of Training
Susan J. Ellis may be best remembered for her prolific writing and famous "Hot Topics," her personal musings on important issues in the volunteer engagement field. But for many people, their fondest memories and biggest 'aha' moments came from Ellis’ work as a trainer. This Training Designs shares the insights and lessons learned from Ellis as she blazed a trail across the field and trained thousands of leaders of volunteers, past and present.
Powerful Questions: Work Smarter with the Answers You Get through the Questions You Ask
As leaders of volunteers, communication and discovery are integral to being effective in our job. It anchors the work we do, whether it be within our organization as we have conversations with volunteers or colleagues, or externally as we focus on recruitment and engagement. As we navigate our way through our day-to-day activities with questions – asking them and answering them – it’s important to consider if we’re focusing on the right ones. Are we looking for more than YES and NO as answers? Are we using questions to drive our work?
Leading Volunteers in a Dangerous Time
Leaders of volunteers around the world now face the COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts, far and wide. At e-Volunteerism, we wanted to try and address this sobering issue and offer some help. From our robust Archives, we bring you the following stories and pearls of wisdom on how to lead volunteers in challenging situations where ethical decisions are required.
We have taken the liberty to keep this important topic posted in Training Designs for the next few months. In June, we look forward to presenting a new Training Designs by Erin McLean, "Powerful Questions: Work Smarter with the Answers You Get, Through the Questions You Ask."
Skills Mapping: A New Approach To Stronger Teams
Working with and through volunteer teams presents as many opportunities as it does challenges. In this Training Design, Nancy Shelford of the Canadian Cancer Society presents a Skills Mapping Workshop designed specifically to successfully empower volunteer groups to identify their strengths. This Training Design helps identify individual and group strengths, and can be used to help identify opportunities to welcome new team members’ skills to the fold.
Three Simple Steps to Turn LinkedIn into a Recruitment Gateway
We’re all looking to improve our recruitment skills and to take advantage of new technologies and tools. This Training Designs presents a step-by-step guide on how to use the search function within LinkedIn to do targeted searches. In these three steps, you and your organization can become a recruitment magnet.
Virtual Volunteer Recruitment Teams: Considerations, Tools, and Training for Success
Recruitment is an integral part of the success of volunteer engagement departments in almost every organization. But when this task is being coordinated by one person sitting in an office space, it can sometimes feel like an impossible job. In a perfect world, that person might be able to find a volunteer with the right skills to support recruitment and screening in local proximity to our organization, with availability that aligns perfectly with the free work station in our office. Alas, we all know this can be far from reality.
In this Training Designs, writer Erin McLean explores how to build a virtual volunteer recruitment team that supports organizational goals and fulfills the multiple tasks associated with successful volunteer engagement. She presents the tools required for operational success and reviews the nuances of training volunteer recruiters who work together remotely. Through this Training Designs, volunteer engagement coordinators can provide effective recruitment and screening support to virtual volunteer recruitment team members that will contribute to the success of an entire organization.
Tried and True Training Exercises: Helping Non-Volunteer Staff Work Well With Volunteers
A core goal of all leaders of volunteers is to ensure that volunteers have a great experience. If you are directly managing the volunteers yourself, that goal can be structured and achievable. But in larger organisations, where the responsibility for managing and supporting volunteers is delegated to specific departments, ensuring a consistent volunteer experience can be more difficult. One way to address this is to provide training to non-volunteer engagement colleagues who are supervising volunteers.
This Training Designs provides practical training exercises to equip non-volunteer staff with the knowledge and skills needed to help create great volunteer experiences. Developed by the head of volunteering development at The Myton Hospices, Warwick, Warwickshire, these exercises have been used successfully to help staff gain a better understanding of volunteering, provide clarity around staff roles and responsibilities for supervising volunteers, and give ideas to manage volunteers well. The exercises are designed to be fun, generate discussion, share best practices, and be memorable. These exercises have worked for many leaders of volunteers - and they can work for you, too.
Humor is the Best Medicine. . . and Training Tool
Humor is personal, but so is learning. And humor can be a welcomed training tool when it comes to training.
In this Training Designs, Erin R. Spink interviews Tane Danger from the Theater of Public Policy (known as T2P2), an innovative group that seeks to enhance learning through improvisational comedy. T2P2 has a track record of using humor and improv to break down complex issues for learners – and create what T2P2 calls “learning disguised as entertainment.” Through this interview, Spink reveals how volunteer managers can use humor in training, too.