April 30, 2026

Episode #212: Impact Lab POV – Volunteer Training Programs Made Easy with Dana Litwin

Effective volunteer training isn’t just about checking a box; it’s the foundation of confident, engaged volunteers who stay longer and deliver greater impact. Yet many organizations treat training as an afterthought, piecing together long, one-size-fits-all sessions that frustrate volunteers and miss opportunities for integration with staff development.

In this episode of the Volunteer Nation Podcast, part of the Impact Lab POV Series, Tobi Johnson welcomes Dana Litwin, expert in volunteer management and past president of the Association of Leaders in Volunteer Engagement (AL!VE). Dana shares how organizations can move from reactive, siloed training to strategic, cohesive programs that boost retention, performance, and community connection. She explains why volunteerism matters more than ever in a time of rapid change, and how well-trained volunteers become powerful ambassadors for your cause.

Together, they unpack common mistakes like treating volunteer and staff training as fundamentally different or relying on lengthy in-person sessions that exclude talented volunteers. Dana offers practical strategies to design flexible, engaging, and accessible training that aligns with modern learning preferences, from online tools to micro-learning. She also provides a clear framework for building a volunteer training program that grows intentionally, not “like weeds.”

If you’re ready to transform your volunteer training from a burden into a strategic advantage, this conversation will give you proven tips, innovative ideas, and the confidence to get started.

Volunteer Burnout – Episode Highlights 

• [00:00] Introduction to Volunteer Training Programs
• [07:01] Dana’s Journey into Volunteerism
• [11:38] The Importance of Volunteerism Today
• [15:03] Common Misconceptions in Volunteer Training
• [21:58] Evolving Training Methods for Volunteers
• [25:33] The Importance of Quality in Volunteer Training
• [31:09] The Importance of Intentional Training
• [34:02] Efficiency in Volunteer Training Programs
• [38:24] Pruning Training Content for Effectiveness
• [43:52] Real-World Examples of Effective Training
• [51:30] Practical Steps for Revamping Training Programs
• [55:50] Creating a Positive Culture Around Volunteer Training
• [01:03:42] Final Reflections And Wrap

Helpful Links

• Volunteer Strategy Scorecard™
• Volunteer Management Progress Report
• Volunteer Nation Episode #033: New Research on Volunteer Funding with Dana Litwin
• Volunteer Nation Episode #124: Equity Tools for Nonprofits Volunteerism with Faiza Venzant 
• Volunteer Nation Episode #202: Volunteer Events without the Headaches – My Training Takeaways
• Find Dana on LinkedIn 
• Dana’s Priceless Advice with Volunteers on YouTube
• Dana Litwin Consulting

Tobi Johnson announces the 90- Day Volunteer Recruitment Roadmap, a focused course in which you will learn how to build a high-converting, repeatable system that floods your organization with quality, committed volunteers and firmly establishes your nonprofit as the “go to” place to serve. Join here at: 90- Day Volunteer Recruitment Roadmap

Contact Us

Have questions or suggestions for the show? Email us at wecare@volpro.net.

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Episode #212: Impact Lab POV – Volunteer Training Programs Made Easy with Dana Litwin

Tobi Johnson: Welcome everybody to another episode of the volunteer nation podcast. Dana was doing something really funny and was making me laugh right before we went live. We’re doing another insight, an impact lab POV series insight interview. And I’ve got my friend Dana Litwin on with me today. That’s why we’re laughing. We know each other really, really well.

Dana Litwin: Woohoo! We got the funny bone buttons installed. We know what to do.

Tobi: So this is going to be fast and loose, y’all. So we are talking about volunteer training programs made easy with my pal, Dana Litwin, who I’m Dana. I think I met you at my very first points of light conference.

Dana: I think so too, and it might have been my very first. So yeah, it was an age ago. That was like what, 15, maybe 15 years, something like that, maybe more.

Tobi: It was… I think my first one was in DC. Did we meet in DC or Dallas?

Dana: Okay, yeah. I think it might’ve been Dallas. It’s been a minute, but all good minutes.

Tobi: Hmm. It’s been a minute for sure. So you know, when I have friends on that are close to me, we have a really good time. So you’re in for a treat, everybody, for listening. So we’re going to talk about volunteer training programs. Here’s the deal. As you know, we have started this Impact Lab POV series where we’re spotlighting ideas from our guest advisors inside the Impact Lab who are shaping the future of volunteer engagement.

Dana: Yep.

Tobi: Couple months ago, I handpicked some people who I thought were the best in the field, and I invited them to come join us inside the Impact Lab and start delivering training. And I was really lucky. Everybody said yes, and we actually have a waiting list of a couple people who also want to get on board. But I was so excited to be able to work with some new folks, bring new voices inside the Impact Lab community, and so what we thought we would do is in each of these episodes in the POV Impact Series or volunteer pro impact POV series, it’s just too long the name. We’re going to explore a unique point of view. Now our guest advisors have all kinds of expertise, but today we’re going to talk about volunteer training programs with Dana. But we’re sort of showcasing some of their knowledge and insights to give you some ideas. And then we’ll also invite you all to join us inside the community. Dana has a training coming up and she’s also gonna lead one of our Impact Lab coaching calls. So let’s get into it. Dana, welcome and then I’m gonna introduce you. So welcome to the pod.

Dana: Thanks Tobi for having me on the pod. Yee-haw.

Tobi: Yee-haw. So let’s introduce Dana in case you don’t know her. If you’ve been on YouTube and you’ve looked for volunteer management advice, you have probably seen her on her Priceless Advice for Leaders of Volunteers. That series on YouTube is her web series, lots of absolutely fantastic tips from Dana herself and also her guests. So she is also past president of AL!VE, the Association of Leaders in Volunteer Engagement. So you might have seen her there. She was a founder of the Multisector National Alliance for Volunteer Engagement and she led the Assessing Diversity and Equity in Volunteer Involvement, DEVI development group that developed that toolkit. And if you want more on the toolkit itself, check out Volunteer Nation episode 124, Equity Tools for Nonprofit Volunteerism with Fisa Vanzant, who talks about the toolkit, talks about how to get your hands on the toolkit, all that good stuff, but Dana was a collaborator on that awesome toolkit to create more equity in our field and to make sure there’s a level playing field. My goodness, you know, I’m like that far out of it that I didn’t turn my phone off. There you go. Just did it. All right. We’re live folk. We’re playing it loose.

Dana: Lucy lucy goosey in good times.

Tobi: Yeah, Lucy, good times. People are like what is going on with Tobi today. I’m going to tell you right now. We’re preparing our house for sale. I would tell a date about this and there is paint everywhere. There are boxes everywhere. I don’t even know where my clothes are in the morning. I have to hunt and pack for my toothbrush. This is why I am the way I am. I swear. I swear that’s the only reason I’m the way I am. No, that’s not true.

Dana: Living in chaos in this moment, yeah. That’s it, just that, just that.

Tobi: So let’s talk about Dana. So Dana is also the president of Dana Litwin Consulting. Since 2002, she has guided organizations in California’s Silicon Valley and worldwide to produce breakthrough volunteer and community engagement programs. She’s a popular presenter at countless learning and professional association events, and she’s featured in professional journals and on podcasts such as The Volunteer Nation.

Dana: Ta-da!

Tobi: If you’re interested in listening to Dana’s previous appearance on the pod, check out Volunteer Nation episode 33, New Research on Volunteer Funding with Dana Litwin. And I will post both that link to that episode as well as the link to the Adivi episode with Fisa. So you all can get your hands on that and understand a little and hear a little bit more of a different perspective. Beyond that, Dana, welcome to the pod and let’s get started.

Dana: Yeah, thanks Tobi. Let’s dive right into volunteer training programs made easy because I think sometimes people over complicate them too much.

Tobi: Yeah, I think they do. Although I do believe that there is an art to training. But before we do that, I’d like to talk about people’s birth stories in the world of volunteerism. So let’s start with yours. Where did you first get into the world of volunteerism?

Dana: Professionally, I got into it around 2002 as an entry-level volunteer coordinator with Project Open Hand, which is a food and meal delivery and grocery service here in San Francisco that originally started out of the AIDS crisis in the 80s and 90s, but has since expanded to anyone who’s chronically or critically ill and homebound can get those services. Previous to that, I’m trained as a musician. The joke I say is I was raised to be a musician, but I’m currently non-practicing. I had had various part-time jobs and being in bands and touring and stuff like that. And I just kind of got to a point where I realized that my creativity and my love of people, being a people person, being an extrovert, I had developed pretty good systems analysis with previous jobs with engineering firms and construction companies. I typically in my college jobs was being a park aid and a seasonal park ranger. So I was very tied to conservation as a value. And my uncle had passed from AIDS in 1992. So I had volunteered at actually Zen Hospice when he was there. And then after his passing in the early nineties, and then, you know, 10ish years later, it just felt like a really good fit for a full-time job and to maybe kick off a different career. And I found within a year that this is such a great fit. I love this so much. I love that there’s a new challenge every day. There’s something different every day. And there just seemed to be so much growth as a career that I had never really considered before. You know, we have that joke between us, I think, as all leaders of volunteers, no one sits in kindergarten going, I want to design volunteer programs someday. But you end up doing that and it turns out to be interesting and challenging and fun and genuinely helpful and impactful. And if there’s anything I’ve ever wanted to do with my life, it’s to try to leave the world a better place than when I found it and how I found it. So I think this work is important, at least for me personally, in my heart and soul. Hopefully it’s having a good ripple effect out in the world as well.

Tobi: Yeah, we have very much aligned values, which doesn’t surprise me because we’ve been friends for so long. Yeah, I worked in nonprofits my whole career before starting my consulting practice, and I never could go work anywhere else outside the sector. Every time I would look at jobs, they just look so boring, you know, plus no meaning, like no meaning at all. And I’m sure there’s plenty of careers out there that have meaning. I know they do. But for me personally, I was like, I have to be working in making the world better. It just has to be. And it is that thing. It’s that value of leaving the world better than you found it.

Dana: Mm-hmm.

Tobi: You know, I think we really share that and I think that drives a lot of us in this field, and that people are an endless resource of ideas and talent and solutions. You know, this really core belief in people as a resource, you know.

Dana: Yes.

Dana: And cooperatively, you know, that our natural human state is cooperative and we’re kind of mushed into current economic systems and cultures that are expanding on individualism. It’s like, no, no, no, human connection is still where it’s at. I think recently we’ve had the Artemis II and that’s pulled people together into kind of an inspirational and exciting new interesting challenge and space exploration and furthest away from Earth, but still connected to Earth. And I think that has to be a core value of anyone who’s a leader of volunteers, whether they can articulate it or not, or whether they consciously think about it or not, that you land in these careers that align with your values if you’re really fortunate working, not just working to have bills paid and the basic necessities of life and the system we’re in, but hopefully it does feed your soul at least some of the time when it’s not stressful or chaotic or challenging or you’re not trying to move a house in the middle of doing everything else.

Tobi: Yeah, hallelujah. Yep. Okay. So, I totally agree. And I think that most of folks who are listening have some kind of value touchstone with volunteerism and community engagement. Why do you think volunteerism in particular is important right now? I feel like we’re in a very strange time in world history. I mean, I think this time period is going to be in the history books for a long time. You know, long before we’re gone, or long after we’re gone, I think that whatever the history books say about us, that we’re going to be there, this generation, this time, because there’s so much flux of everything happening. Why do you think volunteerism is so important in this particular moment in human history?

Dana: I think it’s important, again, getting back to that idea of we are all connected. We’re connected by our humanity. We have shared experiences no matter how much it becomes profitable, especially online or social media or with bad use of generative AI to cause anger and fear and division. Some people, that makes them a lot of money and that’s their maybe aligns with their values if they have any. But I really think that supporting each other, being in community, working together, especially as volunteers versus being a paid jobby job, that is to me the core of our social fabric and the core of society. And there’s, you know, we’ve had conversations offline before as well that a lot of languages don’t even have a word for volunteer, like English does. It’s just, you work with your community, you support each other, you help your neighbor. That I think is remembering our humanity with each other is important in a world that is on the edge of political upheaval, technological upheaval, and the purposeful blurring of reality to create certain narratives of division or hatred or violence. It’s more important, I think, especially to preserving democracy and making democracy stronger, to have that human connection. I think volunteerism and that kind of community connection is where it’s at. I think that’s really the core of solving a lot of issues that are elevated beyond their natural state. We’re not as divided as people think we are when you watch clickbait or news or go on social media.

Tobi: Yeah, absolutely. Well, it’s in our DNA, right? I mean, we never have survived as a species this long without collaboration. And collaboration is the new competition, you know, used to be very alpha in the workplace, even in the corporate workplace, super alpha. And now it’s like with knowledge work, well, actually nobody knows it all and AI doesn’t know it all. We still need human beings working together and solving problems. So absolutely agree. Let’s move on to volunteer training programs and let’s just kick it off with your point of view. So what’s a belief you hold about volunteer training programs that you feel most people in our field get wrong?

Dana: I think the biggest mistake or misunderstanding that even pretty experienced leaders of volunteers have is that volunteer training should be different than staff training. And I kind of get into this in roots, modes, and modules kind of thing that I’ll talk about in my seminar on April 14th, and then we’ll do the follow-up call on April 30th. But I think that often volunteer training kind of grows like a weed in a garden, like it just kind of is made piecemeal or in a very reactive way instead of an intentional and strategic way. And I’ve very often, we’ll share some examples in a little bit, but I’ve very often had what I’ve designed for volunteer training be noticed by HR and adopted by staff as like, that’s actually a better practice than how we’re training our staff. And I think that also reinforces a core value that’s important to any kind of volunteer training, which is getting staff buy-in and getting that understanding that we are all one team. Some are paid, some are unpaid, some are full-time, some are part-time. Some drop in for important stuff once or twice a year, but everyone who’s connected to the agency and involved with the work is part of that cause, part of that mission impact. Kind of thinking about it in that bigger picture way and conveying that and supporting an organizational culture around that idea, I think is important. Volunteer training shouldn’t be drastically different or of a lower quality than any kind of training that staff is getting.

Tobi: Absolutely. And it requires some instructional design. You know, I feel like sometimes people start with their PowerPoint deck. That’s the first thing they do. I need to develop a training. Let me pop open my PowerPoint deck. And like, yeah, you’re missing a lot of steps here. When you started back in the day developing volunteer training programs, what is something that you changed your own mind about as you worked through the years? Because you’ve been developing training for a long time now. Is there anything that you evolved around?

Dana: I did. The first few years, I was a baby volunteer coordinator back in the day. The organization I was with, because we had thousands of local volunteers and it was all in-person work, going to houses, picking up groceries, being in the warehouse, sorting food. I thought it was more important to be strict about schedules and training schedules. And we offered our orientation the second Thursday of the month or something like that and you could drop in. And I pretty quickly realized after a couple of years of that, that filters out people who would be otherwise great volunteers because something else is happening on that Thursday night or they can’t make this strict grocery shift from nine to three PM, but they can come in, you know, 10 to three PM or something like that. And so I started to quickly work with my other two teammates, my director and manager, Sean, and I’m still friends with both of them 20 something years later. We just got together towards the end of last year. It’s important to get that the barriers to volunteering are very often in the scheduling or the type of training that’s happening. If it has to be in person and it’s only at a certain time, you’re just missing a lot of talent. And so I’ve worked and what I talk about in the seminar in particular, but just in my own experience, it goes so much better and you get such a more interesting and skilled variety of people when you can, especially since 2020 and everyone suddenly learned how to use Zoom online. Some of us were online and doing remote work before that. And Jane Cravens talks about virtual volunteering from the 90s onward. But I think now that people are more used to utilizing remote technologies, that’s part of something that can be folded into a training session. Does someone really have to be there in person? Sometimes yes, but maybe not for the root. Maybe just a basic orientation can be an online video with a little quiz or something that can be set up. Many volunteer management softwares have a certain e-learning component that you can work into it or you can get apps that do that for you. Or just like you were talking about, just videos on YouTube, watch this video and take a little pop quiz before you start, so you understand the basics. Also moving around the timing that you can do a certain amount of orientation and training maybe earlier in the process. And that might keep people from dropping off, from flaking out if they can’t get to a scheduled thing. It also helps people set and meet expectations. You want to be as transparent and honest as possible about what people are getting themselves into so that they can reasonably self-select and not cause problems or conflicts or having to drop out later because they thought it wasn’t as much of a commitment or wasn’t what they signed up for.

Tobi: Yeah, I mean, it’s so much easier nowadays to do multimodal training. Even in the Impact Lab community, we started the community over a decade ago, we have switched platforms three times because they have evolved so much. You know, now we have an AI widget inside our platform that only scrubs my content and only takes from my content. We have ways to show short video clips, have tutorials. You can align things in a specific order or you can combine. Now we’re going live from inside the community versus Zoom. So there’s so much more. I remember getting into blended learning early on and helping my clients do instructional design around blended learning. It was partly, and this was years ago, but it was partly online and partly in person. And I think the biggest aha moment for me as an instructional designer when I started getting into blended learning was discerning the difference between what should be in person and what should be online. Your in-person time is so precious and it should be spent on relationship building and practice of the concepts learned. The online training is really good for those core concepts like you said and helping people early on decide whether or not it’s a fit for them. The original volunteer training program I developed for them was we did less online and more in person. And they ended up pilot testing it. They used the system for about six months. Then they started adding more online because people were asking for it.

Dana: Yeah.

Tobi: So there’s, we’ve come a long way. And if you think about how much people are looking at quick short videos on TikTok, on YouTube shorts, on Instagram reels, people are really now even older people. And we should talk about this because I’m hearing a lot of limiting beliefs around older people and inability to use tech, but we’ll get to that. But that’s one of the things that came to mind for me, an aha moment in my evolution as an instructional designer was, there’s actually a time and place for certain kinds of learning. So why do you think it’s important that people focus on the quality of their volunteer training programs right now? I feel like there’s a lot of training as telling versus training as experience. What are you seeing and why do you think organizations that really invest a little in developing better training programs for their volunteers are going to have a critical advantage?

Dana: Well, I think the critical advantage is retention of talent. You don’t have to constantly course correct if someone does… And it comes back to my foundational system, which is the three C’s of a happy team or the three C’s of happy volunteers, which is comfort, convenience, and connection. And so under comfort is training and task. Just kind of easy things to remember. And I think that there’s a danger of… You know, we already know from research that our attention spans are shortening because of hyper short content. Can you concentrate on something for more than six seconds at a time? So I think that blended learning approach of what is absolutely essential for team building, relationship building, job shadowing, practical application of the task, the responsibilities, the skill, people who are doing that better or very well have higher engagement. So that means people are going to stick around. That also means that if someone’s having a good and meaningful experience as a volunteer, they’re going to talk about it. So you get that free ambassador advertising. One of the things that I think is a good universal or core training for every department across an organization to get is a basic messaging elevator pitch about the agency, about how to support it. It can be a one pager. It can be a five minute section of an online training or an in-person training and ideally reinforced in all forms of media. That’s something I’ll talk about in the seminar. Use your learning material and your content in different forms of media to meet people where they’re at. So the people who want more online can access it that way. People who want to read it can read it. People who have to physically embody it can do on the job training and learning. And that’s where that kind of connection is reinforced with training that is engaging people in a variety of ways. And like you said, blended learning versus everybody just sit through an hour long video. It can be asynchronous and helpful, but it’s more engaging if it’s somewhat live or if it leads to an online thing that leads to understanding and in-person job training or shadowing or mentoring, a deeper understanding and then a connection with your teammates or the people you’re working with. And that can actually be true of even remote volunteer things. You may never meet people in person, but there’s something social and live to an online interaction that can reinforce teammates who are maybe working around the world.

Tobi: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think we have to shift from, this is my personal opinion, y’all, and I’m going to give it, thinking of training as compliance, of checking the box. Now, there is some risk management. People have to learn some skills or learn some protocols to manage risk. But when we think of training as compliance, we really lose a lot of creativity. And when we think of training as development of humans, if we understand the skill gap of what these people are, the majority of people are coming and we’ve got to go with people who have the biggest skill gap because you’ve got to teach to that level. That’s best practice in training. But helping people overcome a gap also, like you said, builds their confidence. If they feel like they have comfort, it’s because they have confidence that they know what they’re supposed to be doing. And then there’s also the school of thought, and I also subscribe to it, that training ain’t performance. In fact, a lot of what people learn actually doesn’t even happen in the classroom. It happens on the job by observation, by buddy systems, by just school of hard knocks and try it. And so to skinny down the speed of people picking up things, the right blend is really helpful. And also training the folks who are supervising the volunteers once they are at the end of the training. Because again, you didn’t learn how to ride a bike by watching a video on how to ride a bike. You learned how to ride a bike by somebody pushing you on the bike and you pedaling and either you fell down or you kept riding. That’s how we learn.

Dana: Right. Yeah. Or you took the training wheels off at some point. You went from a tricycle to a bicycle and then you took the training wheels off and there’s steps to learning motor coordination. And I think it comes down to, you’re talking about learning sessions, training, whatever keywords we’re using to describe getting people comfortable with their tasks and their responsibilities, remembering that nobody wants to fail. No one wants to fail. So how can we give people the resources, the support, again, meet them where they are? Different kinds of blended learning that reinforce the same content in writing, in video, in person, because it’s going to click for people at different times and that doesn’t make them better or worse or less than. It’s just, I’ve got different skills and learning style than maybe somebody else does. So if I’m designing things only to how I like to learn them, that’s potentially alienating or not engaging with people in the way they like to learn things and the way they get to know information. And like you said, professional development is appropriate for volunteers as much as it is for paid staff. And some of the most popular, speaking of people asking for extra online things, when I’ve worked with zoos quite often with my conservation background as clients, people want more advanced and interesting modules beyond the basic training that they need. People want to feel like they’re advancing their own knowledge. Someone wanted, can we do more videos that dig into the ecology of reptiles? Can we learn about this? And you can even spin it so that maybe there’s a little gamification or there’s a badge or there’s a level up to it. People who like that kind of gamification in their learning or are used to it from other parts of their life can have a good experience. You don’t want it to ever feel tedious. There might be some things that are less interesting in part of information exchange or training that some people have natural talent for, natural affinity for, more interest in. But you never want it to feel like we’re all stuck in class again, shoved into a box, shoved into a desk, and we have to think this way, and we have to just memorize some stuff for the test. And nobody wants to feel like they’re gonna get a Scantron quiz right after their training session. For those who remember Scantron and pencils.

Tobi: I know. That’s a good reminder, right? That not everybody had a positive learning experience when they were in school. Some people had traumatic learning. They have serious trauma around test taking, around learning. So this is about community building as much as anything, obviously about skill building, confidence building, but also community building. And I think when we keep those things in mind, our training programs are better. What happens when leaders of volunteers don’t approach volunteer training program development in the right way? Not naming names. We ain’t naming names here.

Dana: We’re not gonna name, we ain’t naming names.

Tobi: But have you experienced either as a volunteer or as a leader of volunteers seeing what folks were doing? What can go wrong or what has gone wrong?

Dana: All sorts of things can go wrong. I think, again, it gets down to this approach of was this training developed in response to something? Was it reactive or was it intentional and proactive and strategic and thought through? I often get hired by people who realize that their training has been growing like weeds in a garden, department to department and siloed and no one’s taught, the education department isn’t talking to the management department or the exhibit department. Working with zoos and museums, people get very stuck in their ways. So not just staff stuck in their ways, but maybe a docent that’s been with a zoo or a museum for 50 years is like, well, this is how I learned it in 1975. Like, why do I have to update it every year? Why do I have to learn it again? It’s like, well, the world changes. Science discovers new things. There’s always new information. There’s better ways to impart that information and learn from each other. And if someone’s just still not really consistent with their training, at least at a certain level across the organization, again, it just gets to a higher risk. Someone who’s comfortable in their role and feels connected to the mission, back to the three C’s, they’re automatically a safer person to work with. They’re safer in their behavior, they’re less likely to make mistakes that could hurt clients or at least the reputation of the agency. Having people feel, like you said, confident and comfortable in the task and their responsibilities. I also think it’s important to frame volunteer roles as having responsibilities. They’re different than maybe paid staff responsibilities and they’re different role by role, but just saying here’s a task and here’s a duty. Again, it gets back to that school or militaristic kind of thinking of, I don’t know, do I really want to do this? But it’s like, oh no, no, no, you get to be responsible for somebody getting a hot meal delivered to their house twice a day. Oh, okay. I have a community responsibility. And again, that idea of we’re cooperative, we’re collaborative, we’re here for each other. It’s not just ticking boxes. Yes, there’s regulations, there’s compliances, legal things that certain boxes have to be checked, but having a really solid and consistent, at least basic information training across the organization and then having it be specialized in modes and modules just turns out to be more efficient so that you’re working smarter and not harder. Clients approach me and I do an evaluation or assessment and they’re just wasting a lot of their own and everyone else’s time is really what it comes down to. It’s inefficient. It’s incomplete. Or sometimes it’s too redundant. Like, well, if you learned this in orientation, yeah, there’s a certain time for reinforcement, but why do you have to sit through another training that’s almost exactly like it just because you’re in a different department now. And so there’s a lot of inefficiency and things just being kind of piecemeal and ad hoc that just need a little bit of system organization that still has enough flexibility to it and blended learning aspects to it that as many people as possible can access and potentially support the organization in a variety of ways as a volunteer. Or they might learn, you know what? I’m actually gonna hang back from volunteering because I don’t have time, but I believe in this cause so now I’m a donor or now I’m an advocate that’s gonna share things on social media and campaign for the funding measure that will help these organizations or whatever it is. Really taking that community lens to everything to do with volunteer engagement is, I think, beneficial no matter how far gone into the weeds some systems might be.

Tobi: Yeah. I used to work in a few organizations where there were highly technical roles that the volunteers were taking on. One of my first jobs with volunteers directly was training volunteers. And I would travel around my region and do update trainings every month and volunteers would come for an hour or two to learn some updates to the technical knowledge, but also to do some practice using that technical knowledge. I found we each were subject matter experts in different areas of this whole body of knowledge. So each staff person, I had my subject matter experts and other people had their subject matter expertise. And I found that the training became like sedimentary layers of rock over time. Pretty soon the training goes from like 20 hours to 25 hours to 30 hours to 35 hours. You know, and we were a federally funded program. So there were certain requirements in training as well. And sometimes we are told and mandated to deliver training in a certain way. And I always tell people, well, but you’re not mandated in all the other ways you can support outside of that training module that you’re required by whatever people who don’t know anything about instructional design. I think it’s almost, and if you ask volunteer subject matter experts, like the docent who’s been around for 20 years, they’re going to say, yeah, they need to know this, this, this, and this. They need to know everything from the cave paintings at Lascaux to Banksy in terms of art history. I’m an art historian, y’all. I have a master’s degree. But they will need to be able to, every docent must know every phase of art history, every style of art, every artist, of course not. So I think it’s as much about focus. Really good training design is about not only what you do, but what you don’t do. It’s actually a process of pruning. The best instructional designers, like you said, go in and assess. When I’ve worked with my clients, I’m always like, you know what, we’ve got to take some stuff out here. Could it be provided in a guide? Could it be provided in a quick tip video? Could it be provided in some other resource, job aid or whatever? So I always feel like when we think of good training, we often think more. And I’m always like, actually, the best training is less.

Dana: It’s work smarter, not harder. It’s again, be efficient with everyone’s time and especially nowadays. I had a previous client some years ago, they had their docents go through what was essentially a semester class at USC equivalent. Like it was advanced college equivalent, taxonomy and this and that. And I have personally, with a jazz music degree, when I worked for the San Francisco Zoo in 2008, 2009, I did design from not very much material that was left for me to work with a 90 hour, 12 week docent training meeting twice a week, Saturdays in person and then Wednesday nights in person or online, whatever you can do. Technology wasn’t quite up to where we are now. We had Skype and things like that, but it really, in working with this client in Southern California, I’m like, is it absolutely necessary for people to basically go back to college and do this intense thing? And it’s great that some people want to do that, but not everybody wants to go back to college when they retire and they want to just walk around the zoo and talk about animals. How much of this, and taxonomy especially changes all the time. We discover new species of things and recategorize critters all the time. And so I got them to figure out what’s the most important of this. And then we keep the subject matter experts who have been through that three, four months of class, semester of class, and they can help make videos that are advanced modules that can be more bite sized. And then you want to again, lead professional development, leadership development.

If you have really experienced, fantastic at their job volunteers, invite them, and they have the interest and the personality to do this, invite them to be the ones who make the instructional videos. It doesn’t all have to come from a coordinator or director of volunteers. Mix it up. Have staff and volunteers work together. If you don’t have a marketing or PR department to coordinate filming stuff or making little videos, get in some photography students, some filmmaking students. There’s always somebody who wants to be the next YouTuber influencer and more and more people know how to make and produce videos and edit videos these days. So there’s plenty of skilled people out there and probably in your current volunteer talent pool. I think that what could be overwhelming sometimes about this is like, where do I start? What do I do? Just see where you’re at, start small, maybe start a couple pilot videos, see how people have fun with it, give some guidelines, give a little production guideline so it sounds good and looks good. But I think there’s a lot more that we can lean into creativity around learning sessions and training and whatever we’re calling it than just checking a box and taking a Scantron quiz.

Tobi: Yeah, I think part of it too is understanding the difference between training and education. Training, like in our Master Gardener group, is okay, how do I go through steps to diagnose a plant problem from a community member who comes to me as a volunteer and I’m working a table at a local farmers market? What are the steps that I go through? What are the questions I ask to help diagnose? Not how do I landscape? What are landscaping tips for landscaping yards? So there’s a difference. Both of them, if you have a group of volunteers who love learning like Master Gardeners do, we would shop for these things. But they’re not moving the mission forward per se, they’re building relationships with the volunteers and maybe that knowledge will somehow. But in early induction and orientation, we don’t have time for that. Nobody has the luxury of education. We’re training people to be comfortable, confident and get moving so they can make an impact. Let’s take a quick break and after we’re going to get into some practical tips that you can give, not that you haven’t already been giving people massive practical tips already, but let’s take a quick break with our chat with Dana Litwin on how to build better volunteer training programs. Don’t go anywhere. We got more value bombs for y’all.

Okay, we’re back with our discussion with Dana Litwin on how to build better volunteer training programs. So we’ve talked about your thinking around developing more effective volunteer training programs, Dana. Can you share an example from your work? I think sometimes it helps. We’ve been talking a lot about instructional design and blended learning and the difference between training and education and all that. But maybe share an example from your work or work with a client where even a slight shift made a significant difference in the learning outcomes, which is the real goal. The goal is behavior change. That’s what training is about, right? People learn how to do something different. They actually even change the makeup of their brains through training. Talk to us about, give folks a concrete example of something that looks like success.

Dana: Yeah, years ago with Open Space District, local government agency, we did trainings. I developed with the docent manager and I was the volunteer programs administrator, but we worked closely together and we realized that we were doing levels of training about working with kids and families. Docents and some of the other volunteers regularly do that with educational things and hikes and all that. The staff didn’t know those skills. And so this was that, I kind of hinted at this earlier, we ended up designing fairly, had to be in person because we’re an outdoor agency. And some of it involved hiking on certain properties and identifying plants or hazards or talking about tribal history with the Ohlone bands that were there, things like that. But specifically the section on working with kids and families that we developed had to do with recognizing and stopping bullying behavior or recognizing abuse. And volunteers in California are not legally mandated reporters, but the staff at this government agency were. So even if staff get mandated reporter training, we realized that, okay, we can ask the volunteers to do the state online mandated reporter training, make it very clear that they do not have a legal obligation to report, but we’re spending so much time around kids and families that people having this knowledge, not just in work, but maybe in their personal lives will help. And we had some very real examples of someone on a hike who was a teenager who was on the autism spectrum and he liked to bring a Spider-Man action figure with him and he didn’t talk much, but he loved listening and being on the hikes, but had certain ticks and behaviors that people weren’t sure about. So knowing the difference between somebody just being who they are versus a harmful behavior, understanding, having empathy, again that accessibility piece, like he’s not doing anything wrong. That kid’s cool. And he’s coming back consistently and he’s bringing parents or other aunts and uncles and guardians with him every time. And when he does ask a question, it’s very, very smart. And so we framed it in that it can be uncomfortable to learn how to spot these things, but it’s also important and hopefully you never have to use it, but it’s better to understand early signs of isolating kids or a kid being bullied or they’re being neglected or abused by family members or whatever. Just having that knowledge is empowering. And so we actually had some people who were so uncomfortable with the training that a couple people who were slightly problematic as docents, like they weren’t good at keeping up with stuff, they self-selected out. And it’s like, okay, for whatever reason, that’s better that they’re not with us anymore, that this made them uncomfortable enough that they’re just like, I am not gonna deal with this. But everyone else who stayed, and then when we passed that and invited staff to attend these trainings, and then after a year or so made it all hands mandatory, but still there was flexible ways for staff to come in according to their schedules, everyone was really just, it was eye opening. And again, sometimes it led to some uncomfortable realities of the world we’re in, but it also made people say, you know, I realized something’s happening with my cousin and I can intervene with that kid and get them help, or they’re starting to have a mental health issue and we can recognize these things earlier. Or I do recognize that my niece or my nephew is probably being bullied at school and my brother-in-law isn’t doing anything about it. So it led to some positive real world impacts. And fortunately, we never had an incident where a volunteer had to report to staff that they think that someone on their hike is having something bad happen to them or is in a potentially dangerous situation. But that sharing of knowledge and staff and volunteers learning together and volunteers being invited to get to a level of, you take a 30 minute state quiz once a year, mandated reporter, but again no legal obligation to do it, but we just felt like it was best practice for everyone who was working with kids and families, which is the vast majority of volunteers and staff some of the time, to just be at the same level of high quality learning and training around it.

Tobi: Yeah, and I think if folks are working with the same population, it makes sense that they would get the same training. It reminds me of professional development around professional boundary setting. I remember when I first started working in a direct service organization where I was coming in contact with clients regularly. I was so lucky to work with people with MSWs and people who were really, really good case managers. And I hadn’t had, I got a degree in art history theory and criticism and I was working in nonprofits since I left grad school, but I had never really worked in a direct service environment like that. And so I got to learn at the knee of these fantastic social workers. And we did training on professional boundary setting. And I immediately recognized that, wow, our volunteers work with our clients on a daily basis. We have mentors. We have people who are helping out with job search. We have people coming in our learning lab. What the heck? How come this isn’t part of our volunteer orientation? Because we were working with a group of young people who were going through trauma. Secondary PTSD, our volunteers were at risk of that as well. Not knowing the professional boundary setting, and also young people, anybody in a traumatic situation who’s a survivor knows how to work the system if they need to survive. No value judgment there, but that’s how they’ve survived till now. And so you have to be really on point as a helper, whether you’re paid or unpaid. It doesn’t even really matter, right? The relationships are there and the boundaries can be transgressed if you’re not on point and aware of it. So I love this idea that if you’re working with the same population, maybe you’re not doing exactly the same things, but there are things that overlap that everybody should have skills around.

Dana: Yeah.

Tobi: At this point, probably folks are thinking, wow, I got to revamp my whole volunteer training program. I’m overwhelmed. What should I do? So let’s break it down for people. What’s a first step for someone who’s feeling overwhelmed? They’re like, look, our training program is a hot mess. What are we going to do? What do you recommend?

Dana: I think you can do a really quick kind of almost pulse check assessment, an easy assessment. It doesn’t have to be a deep dive needs assessment. Maybe you’ve already done that. Maybe a consultant’s helped you do that. Maybe you’ve never done that. But just take a quick look with your own expertise of what’s working and what isn’t. And just make a simple two column list. People respond to this, this stuff is working well. We can keep this stuff. This is the stuff that either has to go or has to be updated or has to be adapted or changed. And you’ll probably find more things that you get rid of or that are redundant or that can be combined into a video orientation that works across the organization versus again this piecemeal department by department thing. But you can also just do a good stuff, bad stuff assessment. And then you can start small, you can do a pilot program. You can get a quick jump into, okay, well, what’s the thing that needs the least amount of update or tweaking? And let me just make small changes to the thing that’s already pretty successful and see how people do with those changes. And then can we replicate that change management or what we learned? I like to do a cycle of plan, do, check, act in a circle of maybe every few months. How’s this going? Are we getting some good feedback, bad feedback? And then if that little pilot program works and the department that needed the least amount of changes, then you’ve got a pretty solid model to potentially make bigger changes or adjustments. And you’ve got a better understanding of what timeline you should make those adjustments to that people respond to because huge changes, we used to call them in conservation agencies, acorns from the sky. Someone up high would have an idea, they didn’t check with anybody who’s actually doing the work if the idea’s already happening, they just think they have a good idea and it’s like they throw an acorn down from a 300 foot redwood and by the time it lands, it feels like a bomb has cracked on your head. Acorns from the sky. Drop this acorn and then you’re like, we’re already doing that but they just don’t know about it. So getting that cross-department, different strata of the hierarchies, whatever hierarchies exist, getting everyone understanding, this is what we’re doing with the volunteer program. I also think it’s important, maybe not as a starting point if you feel overwhelmed, but as you get into this, pretty much every agency where I was hired full-time to lead volunteers, even as I was sometimes doing part-time consulting before I went to full-time consulting, is that the other departments and the leaders, they don’t know what they don’t know. And part of our job is to educate them as well about how volunteer engagement works. And so once a year or so, and also incorporate this into the onboarding of new paid staff members as well as volunteers, just a basic 45 minute, here’s how everything works. Here’s the age requirements. Here’s the basics. Everybody should understand this. Here’s the messaging about volunteering and supporting. And staff loved that. They’re like, now I didn’t understand how that worked before. Or I made an assumption that made me have maybe a hostile thing about volunteers, or they’re going to take too much time away from me or whatever. And just doing those in-services shifted a lot of staff from either hostile or neutral to at least neutral or positive outlooks on volunteers. And so if you can make that kind of a cultural shift, if there’s been a disconnect or a misunderstanding or just ignorance from staff about the value of the work that volunteers are doing rather than it’s a hassle of my time to help train someone, then you get that buy-in from everybody involved throughout the organization. And that automatically makes the engagement stronger, makes the company culture better, and having that understanding of volunteers I think helps when budget time comes around as well.

Tobi: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Dana, this has been a fantastic conversation. I hope it’s piqued interest and also maybe a renewed commitment to upgrading your training programs at your organization. In your upcoming Impact Lab seminar, you’re going to on April 14th be offering a seminar called Standardizing Training for Staff and Volunteers Across Programs Without Losing Flexibility. And then we’re having you back on the 30th for people to work through any of their sticky training problems, instructional design problems, or instructional presentation problems, or tech problems, or whatever challenges they’re coming across. So we’re doing a twofer with Dana. What will this training plus coaching session help people do differently, and who would benefit most from joining us and joining the community to get access to those?

Dana: Yay! I think that pretty much any leader of volunteers anywhere in their career can benefit from the ideas and the approach that I’m setting up. And I’m using my musical background and creativity to tie some ideas together that there’s roots, there’s a root training and there’s modes and then there’s different modules that make it accessible. And again, reusing and reinforcing the learning material that you have, the content that you have. And I think that hopefully people will come out of this with a takeaway of, this doesn’t have to be as hard or overwhelming as maybe I thought it would be. And that there is a simpler approach to make the training more consistent, more accessible across the organization and that that’s automatically going to reinforce everything that you want to reinforce about good volunteer engagement and good company culture. So I hope people will realize that it’s not so hard to start this stuff, it’s not so hard to set it up, and that me presenting it in the way that I am and framing this approach will hopefully turn on some light bulbs or get some aha Eureka moments in folks of okay, maybe I haven’t thought about it that way before, but that’s a simpler but still very interesting and engaging way to go about this. Even if you are having to do a certain checklist for compliance in hospitals or healthcare or some highly regulated industry, you can still bring some flexibility and some creativity to any kind of learning event that you’re putting on for volunteers. And also, a lot of this can apply to staff as well.

Tobi: Yeah, absolutely. And if you’re listening and this time has passed or that date doesn’t work for you, no worries, because if you join the Impact Lab, we have replay recordings that are in our library along with all the handouts, the completion certificate. We do start guides with every training, every seminar. So you have implementation tools that you can take away. You know, we got to do it well because we’re the trainers of the trainers, so we better do it well. The other, I’ll call out another resource too that’s in our resource library that I think based on our conversation today would be super helpful. And that is we have a training tasks and priorities spreadsheet. I don’t even, you probably don’t even know we have this, Dana. So it is a spreadsheet with formulas. And what you do is you brainstorm all of the within different domains of all of your volunteer trainings. It might be orientation, it might be direct service, like client intake, different. You list out all of the tasks and when you’re working with subject matter experts and they’re all saying, well, we should include this in the training and this in the training and this in the training, at some point you as the instructional designer are like, heck no. This training is going to be 55 hours long. My volunteers will never show up for this. What it does is you list these out and then you rate them according to these different column ratings that we have in the spreadsheet. And it will calculate the priorities of the learning objectives. And so you can show it to your SMEs or subject matter experts or your boss or whoever’s approving your training design and say, look, we’ve done a thorough analysis of all of the possible things we can train. And these are the top learning objectives that we can tackle in X amount of time. You know, and I always tell people like three to four learning objectives per hour is max, max, max. It should probably be three. Unless you’re an expert presenter, three is probably better. So it really helps you take this massive, overwhelming list of what people would like people to know and what they actually need, what’s nice to know versus need to know. It’s a tool I wish I would have had when I was back in the day because I was the one taking in all this information and having to tell people, no, no, we’re not going to put that in the training. Can’t do it. We don’t want a 55 hour long training. So it helps back you up. But when we do your training, I’ll post that as an added resource to everybody.

Dana: Absolutely, yeah, I think that’s a perfect fit and there’s so many great resources in your community that it doesn’t surprise me that there’s one that I haven’t managed to read yet and that is a perfect fit. Because again, you and I have years and years of learning material and content and experience and knowledge built up and I think it’s gonna be a great seminar and I’m really excited to be on the guest advisors and work with you and the other five great teammates that we’ve got, most of whom I know really well in real life also.

Tobi: Yeah, it’s gonna be fun. Okay gang. So Dana, thanks so much for joining me. We had a really good time. I just saw a painter walk by behind me. It was one of our painters, Carlos. I think he’s looking around for a cover. Anyway.

Dana
We had a painter photobomb, painter photobomb special guest.

Tobi: But thank you, Dana. This has been really fun. And I can’t wait to sit in on your training. Any trainer who’s worth their salt can always learn from other trainers. So I invite you all to join us inside the Impact Lab on April 14 for Dana’s training, Standardizing Training for Staff and Volunteers Across Programs Without Losing Flexibility. She’s going to show us how to lay it out. And then she’ll be back on the 30th for our April member huddle and you can bring all your questions, concerns, comments, and get live advice and coaching. This is something you don’t really get elsewhere. It’s fine to sit in on a free webinar now and then, but you’re not gonna get coaching that way. You get coaching by joining the Impact Lab. So I wanna invite everybody to join us there. It’s really good for intermediate to advanced practitioners. If you’re new to volunteer management, I really recommend our volunteer management fundamentals course. That’s the best place to get the foundation laid before you jump into the online community. So Dana, it’s been fantastic. Thanks everybody for listening this week. We will be here same time, same place next week. And if you liked us, give us a five star rating. I would love to be able to share this podcast with anybody around the world who’s working with volunteers. And we love your reviews. We love to hear your comments about the pod. And if you think somebody could benefit from this, share it with them. It’s a free resource and there’s no reason we shouldn’t be sharing it with our colleagues. All right, everybody. So we will be here next week, same time, same place on the Volunteer Nation. Take care, everybody.

Dana: Thanks, bye.