Training Materials | Get Involved! Resource Clearinghouse

Learn more about best practices in volunteer recruitment and engagement, and how to get the results you need.

NOTE: These are examples from public libraries and should be reviewed and modified to ensure fit with local policies and culture.

Title	Keyword	Tags	Year
Why Should We Pay Attention to Volunteer Trends? If we could see the coming volunteering trends, we could prepare for them, right? Thirty years ago, were there signs that volunteers wanted more… more	Capacity Building, Engaging High Impact Volunteers	trends, corporate	2018
Bibliography on Volunteer Engagement Bibliography and Web Resources on Volunteer Engagement.	Capacity Building, Staff Training	Baby Boomers, bibliography, Lehn	2018
Managing Volunteers: Balancing Risk and Reward A nonprofit faces a variety of risks when it decides to use volunteers. While none of these risks should be ignored, few, if any of these risks… more	Capacity Building, Staff Training	insurance, Risk Management	2018
Building Capacity: Strategic Volunteer Engagement In this Points of Light blog post, the point is made that organizations that build a culture of volunteerism, and purposefully embed volunteerism… more	Capacity Building, Staff Training	Strategic	2018
The Essential Guide to Managing Volunteers at Your Nonprofit A free comprehensive overview for volunteer management from VolunteerPro.	Capacity Building		2018
Build Staff Buy-In for Volunteer Engagement Often one of the biggest challenges to a new model of volunteer engagement is the resistance of paid staff. Often attitudes and fears of our co-… more	Staff Guides for Working with Volunteers, Capacity Building, Engaging Staff and Unions	Staff Resistance, staff buy-in	2018
Volunteer Background Checks: Giving Back without Giving Up on Privacy How do nonprofit organizations screen volunteers? There are several options. The choices depend largely on the volunteer job involved and the… more	Volunteer Screening / Interviewing, Capacity Building, Staff Training	background checks, screening	2018
Grow Staff Volunteer Harmony Tips from Energize Inc. on helping staff to work more productively with volunteers.	Engaging Staff and Unions	staff buy-in	2018
Three Things We Know About Engaging Millennials in Your Cause A quick read on what Millennials are interested in to help you in your recruitment efforts.	Millennials	Millennials	2018
Getting the Highest Visibility on VolunteerMatch – How to RePost Your Listing Keeping your volunteer opportunity near the top of the list in your zipcode is critical to keep it visible to potential volunteers. One of the… more	VolunteerMatch Tools and Resources	RePost	2018
GenerationOn Projects, Ideas and Resources Looking for possible library volunteer projects for kids, teens and/or families? Check out GenerationOn's projects and resources to get some… more	Millennials	Teens, family volunteering	2018
Success with Skills-Based Volunteers A quick read guest post on VolunteerMatch's blog by Carla Lehn summarizing key elements of getting skilled volunteers engaged with your… more	Capacity Building, Engaging High Impact Volunteers	Skills Based Volunteers;	2018
VolunteerMatch Re-Posting Tutorial Reposting is THE MOST IMPORTANT step you can take to get your opportunities noticed on VolunteerMatch. Why? Because VolunteerMatch searches are… more	VolunteerMatch Tools and Resources	VolunteerMatch	2018
Can We Reject a Volunteer? What do you do when someone applies to volunteer and you realize they will not work out? How can we justify rejecting anyone who steps forward and… more	Interviewing Volunteers, Staff Training	Fire, reject, complaints	2018
You Can't Fire Me, I'm a Volunteer! This quick read from Blue Avocado focuses on addressing volunteer dissatisfaction points to the right way to handle disgruntled volunteers.	Staff Training	Fire, disgruntled	2018
Engaging Volunteers from Diverse and Immigrant Communities The Minnesota Association for Volunteer Administration (MAVA) has developed a set of 8 strategies for creating a more inclusive volunteer program at… more	Capacity Building, Staff Training	diverse, inclusive, immigrant	2018
From Management to Engagement: Skilled Volunteers in Public Libraries This one hour webinar -- From Management to Engagement: Skilled Volunteers in Public Libraries -- was produced by the Texas State Library, and… more	Engaging High Impact Volunteers	Skilled Volunteers	2017
Volunteers are the Reputational Assets Your Organization is Overlooking A great reminder in a brief article by Erin Rebecca Spink.	Capacity Building, Staff Training		2017
ESL Conversation Circles Toolkit This wiki from settlementatwork.org could be useful for staff designing and implementing ESL Conversation Circles, and also for training ESL… more	Job Specific Volunteer Training, Staff Training		2017
How Changing Our Volunteer Interview Approach Increased our Retention Rate by 30% Elisa Kosarin of Twenty Hats describes Behavior-based interviewing, and how its implementation in her situation helped to increased the quality of… more	Volunteer Screening / Interviewing, Interviewing Volunteers	interview, screening, retention	2017