How Foothills Church Streamlined Their Training Process And Increased Volunteers By 30%

Can you imagine 98% of your volunteers all being available at the same time and actually attending a training meeting? Despite the reality that those kind of results are next to impossible to achieve with meetings, Landon Reynolds and his family ministry team at Foothills Church were able to get 98% of their Wednesday night small group leaders trained with online training through TrainedUp.

This ability to get everyone trained from the comfort of their own home enabled Foothills to recruit 100 small group leaders with a 30% overall increase in their volunteer base. With the larger number of volunteers, who were also better trained, Foothills saw their largest Wednesday night attendance ever at 551 students — a 77% increase over their average attendance from the previous year.

Getting volunteers trained and ensuring everyone is on the same page has led to a huge increase in ministry effectiveness for the family ministry team at Foothills Church. Training isn’t only about a transfer of information, it’s about scaling your ministry effectiveness and potential for impact. A well trained volunteer team is essential to fulfilling your ministries vision.

According to Landon, “Online training through TrainedUp is essential for training volunteers. Every ministry should be training online because it allows you to steward your volunteers time better. In person training isn’t scalable, TrainedUp is.”

Everyone is busy with a ton on their plates. Our volunteers are pulled in more directions than ever with work, school, kids, and extracurricular activities. An easy on ramp to get volunteers trained on their own time without the need for a training meeting is essential in today’s fast paced world.

Yet, for Landon and his team, they found that not all online training software was created equal. When they first tried to roll out online training they did it through RightNow Media, a great service that is known for being the Netflix of Bible studies. Unfortunately, since RightNow Media wasn’t built for online training it wasn’t received well and only 30% of their volunteers actually completed training. That’s less than the average training meeting.

After a failed attempt with RightNow Media, Landon was still optimistic and decided to try another option, MinistryGrid. This attempt was short lived when the software proved to be too clunky and difficult to use leading to them cancelling before even rolling out any training. Finally after seeing an advertisement for TrainedUp, Landon was able to easily create his training and send it out to his volunteer team using Foothills’ existing church management system, Planning Center. This allowed the volunteers to self-enroll in the course and as mentioned above led to 98% of their Wednesday night small group leaders completing training!

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

“The whole world has moved to digital platforms. Our trainings are not scalable to today’s adult who has so many nights of the week already taken up. We have so much training and information to communicate, so much education to be taught, that we need a platform that’s going to communicate all of that, but that is also scalable to whether you have 10 volunteers or 1,000 volunteers. TrainedUp is that platform.”