How can you sustainably scale your volunteer management professional development program?

1 Assess your needs and goals

Before you plan any training or learning activities for your volunteers, you need to identify your current and future needs and goals. What are the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that your volunteers need to perform their roles and contribute to your mission? How do you measure their performance and impact? What are the gaps and opportunities for improvement? How do you align your professional development program with your organizational strategy and vision? By conducting a thorough needs assessment, you can prioritize your learning objectives, target your resources, and tailor your content and methods to your specific context and audience.

2 Choose your delivery methods and formats

Once you have defined your learning objectives, you need to decide how you will deliver your professional development program to your volunteers. There are many options to choose from, such as online courses, webinars, workshops, mentoring, coaching, peer learning, self-directed learning, and more. Each method and format has its own advantages and disadvantages, depending on your budget, time, technology, accessibility, and learner preferences. You should consider a mix of methods and formats that suit your goals, resources, and audience, and that allow for flexibility, interactivity, and feedback. You should also consider how you will integrate your professional development program with your volunteer recruitment, orientation, recognition, and retention strategies.

3 Design your content and activities

The next step is to design your content and activities for your professional development program. You should follow the principles of adult learning, which emphasize the relevance, applicability, and engagement of the learning experience. You should also use the SMART framework to create specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound learning outcomes for your volunteers. Your content and activities should be aligned with your learning outcomes, and should provide clear instructions, examples, scenarios, and assessments. You should also use a variety of media, such as text, images, audio, video, and animations, to enhance your content and appeal to different learning styles.

5 Evaluate your professional development program

The final step is to evaluate your professional development program to measure its effectiveness, impact, and satisfaction. You should use both quantitative and qualitative methods, such as surveys, quizzes, tests, interviews, focus groups, and observations, to collect and analyze data from your volunteers, trainers, mentors, and stakeholders. You should use the Kirkpatrick model to evaluate your program at four levels: reaction, learning, behavior, and results. You should also use the ROI formula to calculate the return on investment of your program, by comparing the benefits and costs of the program. You should use the evaluation results to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your program, and to make recommendations for improvement and future actions.