Nonprofits, participating agencies, Galaxy Digital, and volunteers alike work, often tirelessly, toward a common goal: to shape better, more caring communities. The collective efforts of this network help to make a tangible difference. However, the logistics of managing a volunteer agency can become overwhelming for many who are already short on time and funds.
The goal of Get Connected is to streamline volunteer management: to allow nonprofits and their network of agencies to come together in one place and share resources. While Connect software is generally intuitive, it’s important to establish a foundation of best practices to get the most from any platform. To this end, Galaxy Digital offers free training for agency managers who are joining a host nonprofit’s site.
For this article, we spoke with Michelle Grasty-Colont, Galaxy’s Training Manager. “We are a support network that wants [volunteer engagement] to be a success,” she explains. Through the agency-manager trainings, Galaxy’s staff works to produce proficient, confident agency users by:
- demonstrating the ease of the Connect experience for both agency managers and volunteers
- offering guidance for finding the right volunteers for their needs
- communicating best practices for using the site effectively
- explaining how skilled use of the site can translate to increased volunteer numbers, longer-term volunteers, and increases in funding and donations
Time and time again, we’ve seen that trained agency managers are more enthusiastic, engaged members of a Get Connected platform because they know and understand it from the outset — and they know how it can benefit their agencies and communities. For those reasons and more, we encourage you to encourage your agency managers to sign up for a training.
Digging deeper: What does training cover?
During the live webinar, a Galaxy Digital expert walks agency managers through the fundamentals of the agency-management experience, clarifying their roles and responsibilities on a Get Connected site while showing them how to use it. Agency managers learn both the “how-tos” and the “whys,” and they’re given best practices based on our wealth of experience observing successful sites. Here are a few examples of what they learn:
- How to create an effective logo, and why it’s important
- How to build a profile page that keeps volunteers coming back
- How to craft the perfect need title for maximum impact
- How to choose the right duration for a need so that volunteers clearly understand their responsibilities
- How to access important quantitative data that can be used for grants and other funding requests
Our regularly scheduled sessions last about 45 minutes and are free — which means little risk with plenty of reward!
In an agency manager’s own words …
After attending a training, Lynda, an agency manager with a United Way’s Get Connected site, wrote to us about her experience with her “easy, informative, and fun” agency training:
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves!
Training emplowers … and transforms
Attending a training implies a first step in ownership. We’ve seen that agency managers are more likely to be engaged participants if they have a foundation of knowledge and responsibility from the outset. Trained agency managers more out of the site than un-trained ones, and training also saves time in the long-run; spending 45 minutes to learn at the start means agencies can forge ahead with confidence and efficiency, building their profiles and posting needs.
We also believe that it’s best for users to understand the value of Get Connected first-hand. If an agency manager takes the time to acquire knowledge and learn best practices prior to launch, they are more likely to engage with your site consistently and effectively.
Take a look at our checklist for nonprofits and agency managers to see how you can help transform your nonprofit partners’ Get Connected experience.
