Getting program participants in the door is one thing—making sure they’re prepared and confident in their roles is another.

Your program staff and volunteers are the backbone of your program, and when they feel knowledgeable and supported, they deliver better results, adapt to challenges more easily, and stay committed for the long haul.

A strong training plan isn’t just a one-time orientation—it’s an ongoing investment in your program’s success.

For a long time, I prioritized program participants, because I thought, without participants there would be no program. Now, drawing on the voices of staff (as well as my personal experiences as a staff member), I recognize that there’s a stronger need for balancing the perspectives of both staff and program participants.

As a result, I prioritize speaking directly to staff who oversee the programs I’m evaluating, and they clue me in to three important factors:

• How the program is supposed to run
• How the program actually runs
• How they really feel about the program

Staff play an integral role in the success of your programming. As they experience the day-to-day compared to leadership, staff should be positioned to bring up concerns AND feel supported in the process. Yet, staff voices are often deprioritized to amplify the expectations of funders, program participants, and other stakeholders.

During a recent project, my project partner and I conducted qualitative interviews with community experts to support a foundation’s strategic investments. Using the interviews and a robust literature review, we drafted a field-driven theory of change. After presenting the theory of change to the community experts, we developed a training with foundation staff who were expected to implement the theory of change’s recommended interventions.

Before the training, we administered a pre-training assessment to assess staff’s general understanding of theories of change, and this specific theory of change. We learned: