An Inside Look Into How Volunteers At Substance Church Reacted To Online Training

“In our kids ministry, we did not have a training system for our volunteers. We’d send out an email with some information and tell people to show up on Sunday. We’d hand them a t-shirt, give them a couple of policies, and wish them good luck.”

Does this sound familiar? For all too many churches, a consistent, sustainable training system seems like a pipe dream. That was the case for Kaylee Elrick from Substance Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a multi-site church of 3700. They had attempted to do live training to provide a consistent experience, but the majority of people could not find the time to attend the training meetings.

As the leadership attempted to get everyone to attend a training meeting, they decided to offer a separate option for those who could not make a physical meeting. An overwhelming amount of people chose the option to participate in the training online rather than go to a meeting. After Kaylee and her team had finished creating their videos from the material that they were already teaching in person, they rolled out their online training to their volunteers.

According to Kaylee, they have received a ton of great feedback from their volunteers about how easy training was and how equipped they now feel to serve. Here’s exactly what she had to say:

“We’ve gotten really good feedback from our volunteers. A group of current volunteers went through our TrainedUp course and gave us feedback that there was all this information that they had no clue they even needed to know. Our new volunteers all feel like they come in equipped to step into their role because they’ve been given all the information ahead of time.”

One of the things that Kaylee loves about TrainedUp is the ability to easily see how her volunteers are interacting with the courses. Instead of just hoping people watch the videos that she sends, she knows whether or not people have interacted with the training. This information helps her to personalize the training and cater her communication to each person based on how they’re interacting. So, instead of sending out a mass email with countless reminders, she can work with each person on an individual level.

Why should you try TrainedUp? Here’s what Kaylee had to say:

“People attending meetings is pretty low. Across the board, I don’t think our church is the only one who struggles with that. People have a lot of things going on, a lot of things competing for their schedules. With TrainedUp we are able to offer training to them in a way of, ‘here’s all the content provided for you. Now you can do it on your own timeline.’ It also allows for us to be able to track people’s interactions and cater the way that we communicate based off of those people’s interactions with TrainedUp. It just makes it so much simpler for people and for our team.

Overall, we were hoping to be able to offer training to our volunteers that helps them feel confident, comfortable, and equipped to be able to do the roles that we’re asking them to step into, and I think TrainedUp has been an amazing resource that has enabled us to do that. We have consistency across the board for every volunteer. They’re getting the same training. One person’s not getting less than the other. They are able to step in and feel equipped to do the things that they are passionate about, and that has helped with our retention rate as well. When people are trained well, they are more likely to stay.”