If folks start making good on their New Years’ resolutions, your phone could start ringing with new volunteers looking for opportunities to help your nonprofit in 2011.

Volunteer managers know that, it’s most important to interview prospective volunteers, and then run background checks to ensure you don’t bring anyone with a criminal past into contact with employees, clients or other volunteers.

What’s next? Training.
Proper training can make the difference between volunteers who enjoy their service and stick around and those who stop showing up after a couple of days.

When conducting volunteer training, remember to start with the paperwork—yours! You’ll need to plan before implementing any type of training program, so take out your laptop, notepad, or tablet computer and develop a plan using these tips:

1. Develop goals or expectations for each volunteer role. This will help you fit the right person with the right job.
2. Find out what your volunteers need from you. Listen carefully and incorporate their wishes into their role. Also, ask your volunteers about their motivations. Some may just want to keep busy, while others feel a desire to give back to others. Still others might want the interaction of seeing and talking with people during the day. If a volunteer just wants to help and stay behind the scenes, you’ll want to find tasks that accomplish that goal. For an extrovert who loves interacting with people, try to avoid assigning tasks like filing or mopping floors.
3. Be sure to incorporate information about your nonprofit organization into your training plan. Don’t assume the volunteers know the mission, purpose and funding source of the organization. Share with them as much information as you can, so they can spread the word about the good your NPO does in the community.
4. Use the buddy system to teach new volunteers exactly how they should do their jobs. Pair them with a staff member or current volunteer, but don’t let them start their new job until you’ve supervised and approved them to begin. Remember, some volunteers will need more training than others.

Tags: Managing Volunteers, Volunteer Background Checks, volunteer retention

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 5th, 2011 at and is filed under Volunteer Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.