When it comes to pulling off an epic volunteer retreat, the key is understanding what it is that you want to accomplish. Over the years, we’ve honed our focus down to three things. We want our volunteers to walk away from the retreat feeling connected, inspired and valued. Our retreat is all about connecting volunteers to each other and to God, inspiring them to become the best volunteers they can be and valuing them for their uniqueness and their investment.
A KILLER THEME
We happen to believe that fun is spiritual and that taking the time to meticulously plan out a fun experience communicates value to our volunteers. The key element of fun for us this year was our 80s theme. Everyone came to the retreat dressed like it was 1983. The soundtrack from the weekend was exclusively from the 80s. All the games, prizes, decorations and snacks were from the 80s. This theme added an incredible amount of fun and structured fun communicates value.
COMMUNITY
Our goal is to weave community into every aspect of our volunteer retreat because we believe that volunteers who serve in community are better volunteers. Because of this, we ask our cell families (teams of volunteers) to carpool and eat dinner together on the way to retreat. We house each cell family together and build in cell family discussion in response to each session. Aside from these elements, we believe that the very nature of getting away together as a community of leaders, staying up late playing volleyball or Setters of Catan, and eating meals together builds community.
GUEST SPEAKER
In our ministry context, we train our volunteers every other week. Our volunteers hear from us a lot. Because of this we will often bring in a guest speaker for our retreat simply because they bring fresh stories, language and perspective to the conversation. This year we asked Brian, our Senior Pastor of Family Ministries and Ian Nacy, a local youth pastor to come and inspire our volunteers.
CONTENT THAT COUNTS
If you’re going to take the time to get your volunteers away, you should make it worth their while. You need to communicate something valuable. This year, our schedule included 3 sessions–two on Saturday and one long session on Friday night which included a 40 minute worship set. If the retreat is all “fun” elements, your volunteers will be asking why they needed to come in the first place.
Here’s our schedule if you’d like to see it: Retreat Schedule
THE VALUE PLAN
There are two ways to do a retreat. There is the, “we have $5 to make this happen because we didn’t plan for it” and there’s the “we’re going to pull of an epic experience for our volunteers.” We’ve found that it’s the little things that communicate value. Choose a camp with nice facilities. Tell the camp what meals you’d like to eat so you don’t end up with cafeteria corn dogs for lunch, bring great snacks, give away something big, put care into the programming elements and for crying out loud, don’t make your volunteers serve on their retreat.
LEAVE THEM WANTING MORE
In my opinion, one of the most important elements to a good retreat is when you end it. It’s always tempting to try to do too much and keep your volunteers for too long. We’ve struggled with finding this balance over the years but we’ve landed on this truth: It’s always best to leave them wanting more. If they can’t wait to come back next year then we’ve nailed it.
We start our retreat at 7:00 on Friday night and end it at 2:30 on Saturday afternoon. It may seem to short but we don’t feel the need to cram hours of training into our volunteer retreat because we already train our volunteers every other week.
So, the key to an epic volunteer retreat is understanding what you want to accomplish. For us, it’s all about connecting, inspiring and value. What’s your goal and how do you achieve it?
