Today’s post comes from Michael Nealis, Interactive Strategy Coordinator for Points of Light Institute.

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays.  A few years ago, I broke out of my family’s tradition of coming together and having a meal to start a tradition of my own.  My best friend and I started making our own Thanksgiving dinner.  The meal has grown over the years, and now we feed about twenty-five people.  This year, two days before the meal, we started doing the prep work.  While we worked, we talked about what we’ve done and where our lives have taken us over the past year.

We don’t get to see each other as much as we used to.  We used to live in the same dorm, now we live almost five hundred miles apart.  This is one time during the year that we know we’re going to spend time together, and we try to squeeze as much silliness and as many 2am conversations into that time as we can.

We work together really well in the kitchen.  We know what the other person is doing, and we’re able to help each other out and have a lot of fun doing something that I’d always seen as a source of stress and frustration when I watched my family members make Thanksgiving dinner.

This year, though, was the first year that my best friend’s wife didn’t have to work and was able to help us prepare the meal.  Having a third person in the kitchen who didn’t really know what was doing upset the balance we’d worked out over seven years of meals together.  Instead of simply banishing her from the kitchen, or getting frustrated and yelling, we did our best to show her the steps of each task.  Sure, it took a little bit longer to do some things, but she also saw some of the tasks differently than we did and really helped us to have an easier time making dinner.

Any time you add a new person to a system that has been working well, the system is bound to be shaken up—whether it’s a new person in the kitchen, or a new volunteer for your organization.  (I bet you were wondering how I was going to get there, weren’t you?)  It’s important to bring them into the organizational fold and have a system in place to teach them everything they’re going to need to know to be an effective volunteer and advocate for your organization.

Whether it’s making sure your volunteer knows how to do the tasks you’re asking them to do, or it’s letting your new volunteer know about all of the things that are commonplace to anyone who has been at the organization for a while, like the finicky front door, everyone coming together for lunch, or the office tradition of getting together to dance at 4pm on Friday.  Volunteer orientations are an important part of volunteer retention for your organization.

A strong orientation program brings a new volunteer into the organization the same way a new employee is brought into the organizations.  It doesn’t just let the volunteer know what their task is, it brings the volunteer into the organizational culture and lets them know just what to expect from their position, their management, and their time in the office.