3.2 ‘I want to feel welcomed and encouraged’

At this stage, a new volunteer has decided to take the next step and commit to volunteering with your group or organisation. They now need to be made to feel welcome and supported through the process of getting started.

We’ve all experienced being the new person somewhere and it can take a while to understand everything you need to know. So, creating an effective induction for new volunteers is crucial to make sure people know the group or organisation, feel part of the team, and get all the information and training they need for their role. Ultimately, you want to ensure that new volunteers are ready to ‘get started’ in their role so that they can go on to help make a difference.

While induction will sound like an appropriate word to some, to others it might sound unnecessarily formal. Volunteer Scotland has found many volunteers welcome the term induction as it provides clarity and, if done well, gives a sense of a group or an organisation being serious about involving volunteers in a meaningful way.

In this course the term induction is simply used to refer to the process you have that makes sure people feel ready to start in their role. For example, the Kilmaurs Gala Committee refer to this period as the ‘welcome’. Whatever the degree of formality, it ought to be proportionate to the context in which you operate, so you ensure it is easy for the volunteer to understand and get involved.

Lisa, from the Community Garden, talks about how induction differs depending on the role at the Community Garden.

Download this video clip.Video player: Lisa, Co-convenor, Polbeth and West Calder Community Garden. All rights reserved.

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Transcript: Lisa, Co-convenor, Polbeth and West Calder Community Garden. All rights reserved.

Lisa

We do have various different types of induction depending on the different role. So, trustee inductions are quite formal, there’s access to our google drive, there’s access to all the documents, there’s access to specialist training. That’s quite specifically tailored for the trustees. For the green gym volunteers the induction is much more coming down, watching the health and safety video, and actually just shadowing or spending time with the green gym leader or meeting the green gym group and just having a sort of tryout with them, seeing if it’s the kind of thing they enjoy doing. And some people also come with a support worker so they can help in that role. Help the meeting people and bedding down into a group and kind of finding out the tasks there are to do. In terms of our events we just really invite people to come along to our meetings so there isn’t a particular induction as such. But there are materials such as our annual report that people can get a flavor of what it is we do and how we work. But it tends to be much more informal and people will dip in and out of events depending on other things going on in their life. Like if they become a student or if they’ve gone into employment so we’ll see them and then we’ll not see them for a while and then they’ll come back. So it’s much more fluid and loose.

End transcript: Lisa, Co-convenor, Polbeth and West Calder Community Garden. All rights reserved.

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Lisa, Co-convenor, Polbeth and West Calder Community Garden. All rights reserved.

Depending on your context, some organisations also use the completion of an induction period, which includes relevant training, as another way of helping a volunteer decide whether they are right for the role. This time allows the volunteer to build confidence, understand the potential demands of the role, how they will be supported and start to build relationships with staff and volunteers.

If it is decided that the volunteer will not be suitable, they will need to be supported as it might be hard for an enthusiastic volunteer to realise they cannot fulfil the requirements of the role. This should include supporting them to find an alternative, more suitable role, either within your group or organisation or elsewhere.

In this video, James talks about learning more about volunteers during the training process and how this is managed if someone is not suitable.

Download this video clip.Video player: James, Volunteering Manager, LGBT Youth Scotland. All rights reserved.

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Transcript: James, Volunteering Manager, LGBT Youth Scotland. All rights reserved.

James

So, one of the important ways that we look at whether a volunteer is a good fit for the organization is how they perform in the training. So, they might be at a stage where they’ve passed the informal chat interview stage and we then want to involve them in the training and that can be a chance to see how volunteers perform in different exercises, what attitudes and values they have. The stuff that might not have come out in a 15-minute telephone call for example. So, another thing we like to do to make sure a volunteer is a good fit is to just check in with them after they’ve started. We usually wait about 3 months after they’ve started volunteering in their role. So, this is after the point that they’ve where they’ve completed all their training, they’re then into a youth group or they’re working in our research team or they’re helping with admin. But we’ll try and check in at roughly 2 to 3 months see how things are going. And that should be a two-way decision so that the volunteer is able to say themselves whether they feel it’s going well, are they settled into the role, was it what they expected, are they enjoying it, is it challenging enough, is it too challenging. It’s also a chance for staff to talk about how the performance is going up to that stage. And what we usually try and do at the end of that is make a joint decision about whether the volunteer might want some more training, they might be fine just to carry on with the role or we might want to look at a different role as there are several different roles within the organization that volunteers can do.

End transcript: James, Volunteering Manager, LGBT Youth Scotland. All rights reserved.

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James, Volunteering Manager, LGBT Youth Scotland. All rights reserved.

And here, Randi talks about the value of the training for him.

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Transcript: Randi, Volunteer, LGBT Youth Scotland. All rights reserved.

Randi

So yeah, there’s an online application form which I found very informative and the site was also very informative. And I think I got a call from James about like coming to, like you know, meet him and, you know, talk about some things. And there were quite a few trainings to go to and I think those trainings really enlightened me to this volunteer experience and what was expected from me. And I found those trainings to be very helpful in knowing what this organization stood for and how volunteers are supposed to interact with the youth and you know just the basic interactions and communications of being a volunteer representing LGBT Youth Scotland.

End transcript: Randi, Volunteer, LGBT Youth Scotland. All rights reserved.

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Randi, Volunteer, LGBT Youth Scotland. All rights reserved.