Training and developing your team is vital not only to staff retention but to your team’s performance. External training courses and conferences are useful, but can be expensive and challenging for staff to embed and put the learnings into practice when they return to their day job.
When you’ve identified a skills or knowledge gap in your team, developing capacity in-house to train your team can enable you to:
· Tackle the specific opportunity, skills gap or change you want to address
· Tailor your training to your organisation and your team members
· Provide follow up to ensure skills and knowledge learnt through the training are being put into practice
In house training case study: Anthony Nolan
As Director of Fundraising at blood cancer charity Anthony Nolan I identified a major growth opportunity in our Community fundraising programme. We had supporters with a strong personal commitment to our cause who had extensive social networks and the potential to raise large amounts of money quickly. Coming from a major donor fundraising background, I realised that if we took a relationship fundraising approach using major donor techniques with these supporters we could enable them to raise more money than they thought possible, and help the charity in other ways such as awareness raising, volunteering and campaigning.
To do this I needed to train the Community fundraisers in major donor relationship fundraising skills. They needed to be able to understand supporters’ motivations, help them explore all the ways they could help the charity, assess their financial potential and provide 121, tailored support to them. To make this shift we needed to build the fundraisers’ confidence and skills to empower the supporters to raise money in the way that worked for them, rather than taking them through a fixed supporter journey on a standard do your own thing fundraising product as would normally be the case. The fundraisers needed to pick up cues from the supporters on what would work for them, make appropriate suggestions and be confident, creative and flexible in how that fundraising would work.
The training programme
Over a 12 month period I devised and delivered a series of training days for the Community team. Lively, interactive sessions covered:
· Understanding donor motivations
· Attributes of a high value potential supporter
· How to have a great first telephone conversation with a donor to identify motivations, potential and explore how they wanted to fundraise
· How to prepare for donor meetings and debrief and follow up
· How to set development plans for supporters and implement them
· Analysis on what was working and what wasn’t
To underpin this training we built the fundraisers’ soft skills. We focused on how to use open questions to have really effective phone and face to face conversations with donors. We built confidence by using real life case studies in the training where we had successfully used the new techniques. We empowered fundraisers by anticipating tricky questions or situations and brainstorming them together.
We identified each team member’s preferred learning style and the training formats were devised to adapt to activists, reflector, theorist, pragmatist preferences. We used role play extensively, both in pairs and with one pair demonstrating to the group.
Learnings were embedded and refined by a constant cycle of quick feedback between Managers and team members post phone calls and meetings with donors; key learnings being shared in regular team meetings; and an informal buddying system for team members to practice techniques outside of the formal sessions. We devised simple check lists and templates for fundraisers to follow.
Results
So did it work? By implementing a relationship fundraising approach and up skilling the team to make it happen, Anthony Nolan quintupled its Community net income to over £1.25m at a 6:1 in year return on investment. Average raised per Community supporter was £899 compared to a present-day benchmark of £469 per supporter. The training created a highly skilled and experienced team, which enabled us to internally promote team members when vacancies arose, in turn boosting retention.
Developing and delivering the training in house enabled us to target our time on our area of greatest potential and ensure it was tailored to the charity and our team members.
How I can help your organisation
If you have training and developing needs in your team, I can help with:
· Understanding the training need you want to address
· Assessing your team member’s learning styles and how best to tailor the training to them
· Developing and delivering bespoke training courses for teams and small groups
· Producing templates, how to guides and check lists for teams to use when implementing the training back in the office
· Providing follow up mentoring and coaching for small groups and key individuals 121
· Evaluating effectiveness and impact
To discuss how I can help with training and developing your team, contact me at cmilesconsulting@outlook.com