How to Make the Case for Staff & Volunteer Training

Training often happens in reaction to workplace events—something went wrong, so now it needs to be fixed. But really, training works best when it’s proactive preparation—what do we need to do to stay relevant, deliver great service, and adapt to a changing workforce and world?

Making training proactive takes time, money, and thought. It’s relatively easy to throw something together to deal with a “problem” after the fact. It takes a lot more effort to design training that truly works.

Thinking this way turns training from an expense into an investment. Making the argument that it is an investment can be tricky, though—especially when budgets are tight and there are more immediate needs or more people jockeying for resources.

But just because it's hard to make a case for planning and funding doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Let’s look at how you can build an argument that moves training from “nice to have” to “necessary”.

What Can Poor or Inconsistent Training Cost Your Organization?

Thinking of training as “nice to have” rather than a necessity is common. In mission-driven organizations where there is more work than people to do it, training can be an afterthought. And, when budgets are small, asking for funds that don’t directly support forward-facing services is a hard sell. Oh, and many mission-driven organizations don’t have someone to manage training, making it even more difficult to implement a sustained program.

But there are hidden (and not-so-hidden) costs to weak training—or no training at all. They may not affect your organization right now, but they will in the long run. Let’s look at a few.

• Unengaged employees. Most employees want training. If it’s good, and directly relates to their job, they see it as an investment in their success. Not offering training suggests they (and their work) aren’t valued. When that happens, they start to check out, which slows services and innovation.
• Poor customer service. In a mission-driven organization, poor service becomes a problem fast—since staff are likely to be working with the community, including people who are already struggling. And it’s not just about clients. You never know who is walking through the door—the person who received bad customer service could have been your next major donor.
• Low retention and high recruitment costs. If they don’t stay and drag your organization down, disengaged employees will just leave. And, with the shift in modern workforces, they don’t even have to be disengaged to leave. We know training Gen Z workers isn’t negotiable: they want it and expect it as standard practice at work. When people leave, organizations have to recruit, which costs time and money—up to 50% to 200% of their annual salaries, according to Susan Thompson on Small Business Trends.
• Higher costs. Recruitment expenses are probably the most direct and immediate cost of lack of training. But other costs lurk in the background, like slower service delivery. And in an environment where fundraising pots are shrinking, and competition is higher than ever, any wasted funds have a huge impact on what you can raise and what you can do with it.
• Lack of strategic alignment. The mission in mission-driven organizations? Sometimes it creeps. In fact, mission creep can be a real problem for public-sector organizations, where there are so many needs and shrinking social support to meet them. If you spend time and money on things that don’t move the mission forward, it takes away from the actual work you’re trying to do and can cause long-term problems with organizational culture and fundraising.

How to Make the Case for Training

So how do you make a case for training? Here are nine steps:

1. Make Sure Training Is the Right Solution

You may want to jump right to making the case, but take some time to determine if you really need training. There may be other issues going on that training can’t fix. Ask yourself:

• Do people know what they need to do to get their jobs done?
• Do they have the tools to do what they need to do?

If the answer to both of those is yes, you have a communication problem, not a training problem. Throwing money at training when training won’t fix the issue wastes money and hurts the program in the long run.

2. Identify the Performance or Skill Gap

Identifying performance and skills gaps is core to designing any training program, and to developing a case for training.

Start by thinking about what people currently know and do, and what’s required to meet your organization’s goals. If they don’t have the skills to meet future goals, those are your skill gaps. Once you have them, it’s easier to justify training costs and target programs to areas that need improvement.

3. Connect the Gap to Your Organization’s Goals

Next, link those gaps to your strategy. Ask these questions to make the connection:

• How do these gaps prevent your org from meeting its mission?
• How is service slowed because of these gaps?
• How can training realign work to meet the strategic goals of the organization?

Use the answers to show leadership that there are obstacles to meeting strategic goals. It can help to turn obstacles into stories to make the message stick. A great before-and-after story can make the problem (and the solution—training!) hit home. You could link how poor customer service led to a drop in donors. Then, outline how training on building relationships with donors increased funds by a certain percent.

4. Describe the Training You’re Proposing

Once you see your gaps and can link them to strategic goals, you’re ready for the next step—how training can close those gaps. This is the heart of your case. Explain why training can close the gaps, and how closing them aligns with your organization’s mission. Try to show how training will help the organization. Will it get things back on course? Make it more innovative? Or make room for other services that seem impossible to offer right now?

5. Define What Success Will Look Like

Be explicit about your goals and plans for the program. What do you expect to happen because of the training? How many people do you think will attend? What are the new behaviors you hope to see after the training? Pay special attention to this last point. The number of people trained matters far less than whether they can retain the training and apply it on the job.

For example, you may expect people to write more professional emails or answer more customer support calls. Spell this out in your case: what you want and how training will get you there. As always, link it to the mission as a whole. How will better emails or more phone calls meet client needs and advance your mission?

6. Show the Expected Value

As with defining success, you want to spell out the return on investment (ROI) explicitly. Don’t let leaders guess at the benefits of training—show them!

ROI is what your organization can expect to get back from training. Show that for every dollar you spend on training, you get more back in cost savings. Julie Perrine recommends that you “Present your time and cost savings projections. Use concrete examples to show how this training will lead to improvements in your daily work, your team’s output, or the [organization’s] bottom line.”

There are many ROI calculators out there. Perrine offers a simple one:

• Time saved per task: ____ minutes x tasks per day/week: ____ = total time saved per day/week:____
• Hourly rate: $_____
• Total daily/weekly savings: (time saved ÷ 60) × hourly rate = $____
  

You can’t always measure things in terms of cost savings, especially for mission-driven organizations. If you’re training for soft skills or leadership skills, ROI can be harder to calculate. Instead, look for behavior changes over time. You may be able to link them to money saved, time saved, more people served, or more donations.

7. Be Specific About What You Need

You may be noticing a pattern here with these last few steps, but it’s worth repeating. The more specific you can be, the more convincing your case. This isn’t the place to make vague statements about training or cultures of learning (even if you believe in them). Instead, spell out exactly what you need and why so leadership can understand your case. Here are some questions to address:

Time

• How long will training take?
• How often will it happen?
• Will it be integrated into the organization, or do people need to take time off daily tasks to attend?

Tip: Thinking about how you deliver training will directly affect the time you need. In-person vs. Online training needs are different, though Jennifer Patterson in Forbes points out that “e-learning can be less expensive and easier to scale than other forms of training.”

Personnel

• Who will assign training?
• Which employees will be trained?
• Who will develop training?
• Who will deliver it?
• Who will assess and report on it?

Tip: Great trainers are made, not born. Don’t be afraid to tackle training! Keep reading for tips on how to start small.

Budgets

• How much will it cost?
• Who is going to pay for it?
• Who will manage the budget?

Tip: Training has to be funded. If your org isn’t willing to put money behind it, your program won’t be successful, no matter how dedicated you are. As Christa Reyes says, “There's no doubt—training requires a financial resource commitment by senior organizational leadership…It's not something to cut corners on.”

8. Explain How You’ll Measure the Results

Throughout your case, pull in data wherever you can. Including data helps you defend your case by grounding it in numbers, charts, and feedback that leadership can understand.

You can use data to fill in the gaps, like showing how many clients have been turned away in the past year. Or use it to show where other organizations are pulling ahead. Are direct competitors beating you at grant writing or fundraising? Show how training can help!

Best of all, you can use data to illustrate the success of past training! Measuring training outcomes gives you powerful data you can use to persuade leadership to fund even more training. This helps leaders see that they’re funding something that works, not throwing money at something that doesn’t!

9. Make a Clear Ask

Always end your case with what you want leadership to do! A closing call to action lets them know exactly what you need. As always, be specific! You can end with something like:

“I’m requesting ___ funds for ___ training for ___ staff and volunteers. This training will be designed by ____ date and delivered by ___ date.”

Though there may be some negotiation, stick to your main argument about why you need this training at this time (remember the gaps and strategic alignment)!

Start Small, Then Build Support With Results

Making the case for training doesn’t mean you have to launch a full learning and development program at your organization.

Instead, starting small and building from there is often better. You can take one training need and one audience, then develop one program to start. Make the case for this one training, gather feedback to measure success, and use it to launch a second initiative or bigger program using the steps above.

Eventually, you’ll build a sustainable culture of learning that will make the case on its own. Training won’t be something that is “nice to have”, but a core part of how things are done at your organization.

Help Leadership See the Value of Training

Making a case for training is hard. It takes some work, but it has real—and real-world—benefits. As Ally Heinrich points out, “Investing in employee training and development is more than a workplace benefit; it’s a strategic decision that shapes your organization’s future.”

Start by helping leadership see where you are now, where you want to go, and how training can get you there. Once you have them on board, you can start developing a training program that will move your organization into the future!