Beyond Excellence!
A Volunteering Legacy for your organisation
As close as you’ll find to one-to-one mentoring, use this intensive support service to radically enhance your management of volunteers. We will help you to explore ways to embed structure and procedures, tailored to your context, that maximise your recruitment and retention of volunteers. Discover how to facilitate more effective monitoring and collection of evidence about your service. Look at how you might create new opportunities for people to help your organisation and its beneficiaries by volunteering their time, energy and skills.
‘Beyond Excellence Action Learning Sets’ may, for some people, be a more pertinent alternative to our widely acclaimed training programme The Complete Volunteer Manager. The Action Learning Set approach enables a much greater focus on an organisation’s specific relationship with volunteers. Although initially designed primarily for organisations where volunteer engagement may be limited – for example, to governance positions (board or management committee members), it has proved to offer a powerful tool set for volunteer managers more widely.
In a fusion of mentoring, inquisitorial discussion and small group workshops, you will have the chance to:
- Explore and recognize how detailed volunteer role definition becomes the absolute foundation for all aspects of successful management
- Discover how, where and why volunteers might add new dimensions to your organisation – through building capacity or enhancing and improving quality, outcomes and profile
- Develop procedures for a best practice approach to preparing your organisation for volunteers
- Advance your understanding of the importance of ‘selling the benefits’ of volunteering, and
- Learn how to apply this thinking to your own context in a detailed and focused way.
Tried and Tested
Having, through 2013 – 14, successfully trialled this innovative approach to developing volunteering roles, Volunteer Glasgow is now opening it to general access. Participating groups (22) through the trial period created in excess of 45 new volunteering opportunities for an estimated 156+ people – you can read some of their comments below and view the short video above for one person’s detailed feedback. Several participants have found the process
How It Works
‘Beyond Excellence’ action learning sets are facilitated by Jim King, Volunteer Glasgow’s Training Officer. There are 3, half day sessions in each set (three hours). They are spaced two weeks apart to allow participants to have time to consider their learning within their own context and garner issues for discussion at subsequent sessions. The cap on group size (six participants) enables each person to have considerable attention paid to their own context.
How to Get Involved
If you would like to find out more about how Beyond Excellence could benefit your organisation, contact Jim King 0141 226 2566 (direct dial) or 07710 976 751 (mobile) jim.king@volunteerglasgow.org …or to book your place, contact Jim or David Currie 0141 226 3431 (office) david.currie@volunteerglasgow.org
Previous Participants have said…
- “This training was very relevant. We have been considering involving volunteers for some time but had been unsure of what to do; where to start; and how to manage their engagement. This is all much clearer now.”
- “I particularly enjoyed group discussions where one organisation’s volunteering needs were dissected, I found this very useful.”
- “Very well put together course. The trainer was very good, a font of knowledge in voluntary sector and I’m glad I was able to be a part of it.”
- “The format was informal and relaxed. It allowed time to explore individual concerns and we were able to identify with issues raised by others.”
- “The relaxed sessions have been great with lots of group interaction and space to reflect on our own situations and organisations. The handout information is extremely useful.”
- “Thank you – I have gained a wealth of valuable knowledge.”
- “An excellent opportunity to pick apart our processes and see what needs addressing, as we had the trainer’s full attention.”
