Tenants of Effective Training

• Communicate: Spread the word about our mission, values, and expectations.

• Educate: Teach volunteers how to be successful.

• Motivate: Share goals and get volunteers excited.

• Integrate: Bring leaders into the University family.

• Congratulate: Use training as a reward for volunteers.

According to Kathy Bickel in her book Alumni Clubs and Chapters, the above tenants are what should exist in all alumni volunteer training programs. I think that all of these things exist in our current training model, but some of the tenants are much stronger than others. For example, we use our annual training weekend, the Madison Alumni Conference to train but also thank and reward our volunteers. This weekend has always been very popular and scores very highly in the survey data we collect every year. During this weekend we also do a lot of training with University officials, as well as tours of new facilities and sneak peaks in to upcoming plans. With these things we are able to integrate our volunteers in to the university family while also arming them with the information they need to share updates back in their regions. 

On the flip side, our current training model does not a lot for much time to be spent training volunteers on the mission, values and expectations. Most chapters are able to create their own set of goals and stick to them, which works most of the time but certainly has a lot of room for improvement. An introductory training module would allow for all of the chapters to start off with the same instruction that covers the overall mission of the Alumni Association and how chapters fit in to that mission, and to give an overview of what types of events and engagement strategies will be the most effective for connecting alumni in their areas.