Implementing Centralized Volunteer Training to Maintain Culture and Vision at Multisite Churches

Multisite churches face several stages of growing pains as they expand from one location to two, then from two to three or more. At each expansion stage, they face a specific challenge: maintaining culture/vision.

Maintaining culture and vision

In single-site churches with one teacher, the teaching time is the primary dispenser and maintainer of vision. This dynamic can easily be maintained in a multisite church with a single primary teacher, but when each campus has their own teacher it requires more intentionality to maintain vision consistency in the teaching time.

But maintaining culture and vision doesn’t only happen in the teaching time. There are many other areas of ministry where vision is dispersed and culture is ingrained. Staff meetings, volunteer training, leadership development, and digital communication are just a few.

Of that list, staff meetings and digital communications are the easiest spaces to maintain consistent vision and culture because those are generally centralized or led by a senior leader in the church. But for many multisite churches, the breakdown in vision and culture happens in volunteer engagement and leadership development.

Solve the volunteer engagement challenge with centralized volunteer training.

Centralize volunteer training

Training volunteers is a big task and is often sidelined to something akin to “on the job training.” This method has its merits, but if that is the only strategy for volunteer training in a church, then that church will see problems with training quality, volunteer preparedness, volunteer buy-in, and connection to the vision. That’s a problem.

Bottom line, churches that are able to maintain growth and volunteer quality and buy-in have decided to centralize volunteer training. In that model, increased efficiency for campus leaders is an excellent byproduct.

What does centralized volunteer training look like? It often includes a slew of videos on YouTube that are emailed to a new volunteer. Maybe there are some PDFs to read or a survey to complete. Very large multisite churches have adopted expensive Learning Management Systems to organize their training experience for new volunteers.

What every multisite church experiences (at some level of effectiveness) is that centralized training reduces the border of training on the campus staff and promotes consistent quality and maintained culture and vision.

TrainedUp is built for multisite churches to centralize volunteer training and leadership development in a way that hasn’t been possible before. Every church gets a full-featured free trail to see if it’s a tool that will help them. You’ll be able to cancel any time, so there’s no obligation.