One Common Trap in Volunteer Training (and What To Do Instead)

Apr 27

How to design volunteer training for your nonprofit

Training volunteers is one of the most complex and overlooked areas of nonprofit training and development.

In this episode, I had the privilege of talking with the VP of Training at For the Children, Jim Farmer, to unpack how organizations can design training experiences that actually prepare volunteers to succeed without overwhelming them or driving them away. Jim shares how his organization has reimagined volunteer training through trauma-informed care, relational learning experiences, and intentional design choices that meet volunteers where they are.

▶️ Key Points:

00:00 From corporate L&D to nonprofit leadership

12:38 Training employees vs. volunteers

15:30 Common challenges in volunteer training

17:32 Trauma-informed care in training

21:33 Building volunteer training programs

A Common Scenario for Nonprofits: Training Volunteers

You only have your volunteers for three hours on a Saturday morning. Or maybe five days at a summer camp. Either way, it feels like there’s never enough time so you do what many well-meaning L&D professionals do: you fill every minute with content.

It feels like the respectful thing to do. They gave you their time. You want to make it count. But here’s the truth: cramming more content into a training doesn’t honor their time. In fact, it might just waste it.

In episode 183 of the Learning for Good podcast, Jim Farmer—VP of Training and HR at For the Children, a faith-based nonprofit equipping volunteers to serve children in foster care—got candid about what it really takes to train volunteers well. With over 15 years in L&D and more than a decade as a volunteer himself, Jim has seen this challenge from every angle.

His insights are worth slowing down for because they apply far beyond foster care camps. They apply anywhere you’re trying to turn volunteer training into real behavior change.

One Common Trap in Volunteer Training

Here’s the trap that almost every nonprofit L&D professional falls into at some point: You know what volunteers need to learn. You also know they won’t be in the room with you very often. So when you finally do have them, you load the agenda.

Jim named it directly:

“If people are taking time out of their daily lives and you have them for a day or half day, there’s that tendency to fill it with as much information as you can to honor their time. But if you overstuff it, then they’re gonna forget it anyway.”

We know this. The learning science is clear: cognitive overload kills retention. But knowing it and designing against it are two different things—especially when stakeholders are asking you to cover more, not less.

This is where L&D leaders need to step into a more strategic role. The question isn’t “What do we need to cover?” it’s “What does this volunteer need to do differently after this training?” One question produces a content list. The other produces a behavior change goal. Those are not the same thing, and your training design should reflect the difference.

Jim’s solution: drips, not floods. Core essentials in the room. Reinforcement through emails, short resources, and follow-up touchpoints afterward. Not everything has to happen in the training session and trying to make it happen there often guarantees it won’t stick.

How to Design Volunteer Training

Volunteers are not employees, so we have to design differently. For volunteers, for example, it’s not just skill that matters; it’s connection.

Jim spoke to this with conviction:

“When you get folks into a room together to learn, the stories come out, the heart comes out, and you can really connect with their heart in a deeper way—which is also important because we want the volunteers to stay invested for quite some time.”

This is why For the Children has resisted moving their training entirely online, even when it would be logistically easier. The relational component of their in-person week—the shared meals, the overheard conversations, the moments when a new volunteer realizes someone else is carrying the same uncertainty—can’t be replicated by a video module.

But that doesn’t mean virtual training can’t be relational. Jim’s suggestion for organizations that can’t gather in person: carve out intentional space for connection. A 30-minute virtual coffee before the training officially starts. A breakout room where people share what brought them to this work. A follow-up call after the first experience where volunteers can debrief and ask questions.

People stay where they feel seen, known, and connected. Training is one of your best opportunities to create that feeling—if you design for it intentionally.

So how do we design intentionally for volunteers?

Jim and I discuss focusing on these questions:

What is the one behavior you most need volunteers to demonstrate after this training? Not a concept. Not an awareness. A behavior.
Does every element of your training agenda connect to that behavior? If not, what can move to a follow-up resource?
Where in the training have you built intentional space for connection—story sharing, conversation, relationship? Even 20 minutes matters.
What support structure exists for volunteers after training, when the real test begins?

From Training to Real Life Implementation

One of the most instructive aspects of Jim’s approach is how For the Children handles the gap between initial training and in-the-moment performance.

You can train a volunteer on trauma-informed care principles for eight weeks. You can walk through the theory, the language, the best practices. And then a child has an emotional meltdown at camp, and that volunteer defaults immediately to how they were parented because that’s what’s wired in when things get hard.

Jim’s organization addresses this with on-the-ground coaching. Trained practitioners are embedded in the camp experience specifically to walk alongside volunteers in those difficult moments—not to judge them, but to offer a gentle redirect. “Hey, why don’t you try a more playful engagement to get them to transition to that next activity?”

This is performance support at its best: training that doesn’t end when the session closes, but continues into the moments that matter most. It’s also a powerful reminder that behavior change is a process, not an event. One training session—no matter how well designed—rarely produces lasting change on its own.

The question for your organization: Where are the moments right after training where your volunteers are most likely to revert to old habits? And how can you put support structures in place to bridge the gap between what they learned and what they do?

What This Means for Learning Leaders

If you’re a nonprofit L&D or HR professional responsible for volunteer training, you already know the pressure. You’re expected to get volunteers ready fast, cover everything the program team wants covered, and produce results—often without sufficient time, budget, or influence over the design.

That’s a frustrating place to work from. But the more clearly you can articulate why your training design choices lead to better outcomes, the more credibility you earn to make those choices.

When a program director wants to add three more topics to an already packed training, your job isn’t to say yes or no. It’s to say: “Help me understand what you want volunteers to do differently as a result of learning that. And let’s figure out whether this training session is the right place for it, or whether we can get that information to them another way.”

That’s a strategic conversation. That’s the kind of partnership that shifts your role from order-taker to advisor—and that ultimately leads to training that creates real change, not just completion certificates.

To learn more about designing volunteer training, tune into episode 183 of the Learning for Good podcast.

Additional Resources Just for You

Other Helpful Podcast Episodes:

Subscribe to the Nonprofit L&D Insiders.

Join the Nonprofit L&D Collective.

Support the Learning for Good Podcast

Become a sponsor.

Ask a question or suggest a topic.

We love hearing from listeners!