Q&A: How Should I Think About Curriculum for Volunteer Onboarding?
Q:
I am currently working on a book to use for our volunteer onboarding process. There is so much info that I want to relay effectively, but I am having trouble deciding what information to include.
[Jarvis Brennan, Connections Director, LifeHouse Church, Townsend, Delaware]
A:
I’m grateful for this question, because it draws attention to an important point: every volunteer should be rallied to a common cause. A standardized, unified curriculum can set the stage for that cause, and gets your volunteers on the same page from the jump.
That said, it can be hard to figure out what goes on that page. I’ve developed a few foundational curricula in my day (if we’re defining foundational as the entry point we’re building upon), and there are a few principles I try to follow when designing content:
1. Shoot the arrow and draw the target around it.
It’s one thing to come up with brand-new, never-been-seen-before training content that is completely aspirational. It’s quite another to take what is already true (and good!) from your team, and seek to document and replicate that.
Our content for various trainings tends to have a lot of fits and starts and early drafts and final revisions, but we try to start with what what we’re doing and what we want to keep doing, and the values that are true of our team that we want to keep being true.
2. Point to the why more than the what.
I believe that anything that can be classified as “onboarding” – that type of training that in inducting someone into a cause – should be far more vision-casting than task-defining. Yes, you want some practical elements of the training (“What are you actually asking me to do?”) But you want to stress the heart with which they do it.
3. Focus on published, not perfect.
My name is pot, and I’m calling the kettle black. This is a never-ending struggle for me, in that I want the stuff that gets put out to be exactly right. Some of that is from an efficiency and expense standpoint: I’d rather get the best price break on a large print job, but I can’t print a ton if there are errors that need to be corrected or new material we forgot to add.
But start somewhere. Maybe an in-house print is just fine for the first iteration. Get a few teaching reps under your belt, figure out how to say certain things better, how to order content most effectively, and what lands with your crowd vs. what doesn’t. And at some point, go for the large print job. Pull that trigger and walk away.
4. Don’t try to cover all the material.
Most of our curricula has far more content than someone will ever actually teach (or that we’d even want them to teach). We’ll often include sidebars and bonus quotes and appendices so we can cram in some things that might make for good additional content on the end user’s own time, but it’s not necessarily pertinent for onboarding. For example, our Guest Services Training manual includes a bonus article at the end, some FAQs, an org chart, a recommended reading list, and more. We never get close to that stuff during the training, but it’s there for the super nerds to read to their hearts’ content.
5. Make the training evergreen.
Several years ago when developing the booklet for our membership class, we faced the conundrum in point #3 above. We wanted a really nice printed piece, but knew that if we included any number of things – a list of our current ministries, or small groups, or directional elders – those lists would be outdated as soon as the first book rolled off the press.
So in that particular case we developed a companion webpage, and throughout the book we scattered simple urls that pointed to the page and instructed people to click on whatever: small groups, ministries, elders, etc. And those links would push them to our website, where the current information was always up to date.
Doing this allowed us to go all out on the booklet, knowing we could get the best price breaks and focus on the content that was not changing, while letting the website take care of the stuff that would.
Let me repeat what I said at the beginning: every volunteer should be rallied to a common cause. The work of putting together onboarding material is laborious, but it’s worth it. Which of these five principles will get your project across the finish line?
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photo credit: Rob Laughter
